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|L1BRARY OIMJONORESS.I 

J UNITED STATES OP AMERIOA. ?| 



CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 



Classical and Scientific Studies, and the 
Great Schools of England : 



LECTURE 



READ BEFORE THE SOCIETY OF ARTS 

OP THE 

Ulitssufbusctts institute of Cccbiiolo^n, 

April 6, 1S65. 

/ 

By W. P. ^ATKINSON. 



WITH ADDITIONS AND AN APPENDIX. 



■' Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur." 

Camiiritrge : 

SEVER AND FRANCIS. 
1865. 



A 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by 

W. P. Atkinson, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 



BOSTON: 
PKESS OF JOHN WILSON AND SON, 

15, Water Streei. 



PREFACE. 



It will be obvious at a glance that I have extended this paper 
quite beyond the limits of a ledlure ; and I ought to state, that 
for the sentiments, both of the part which was read, and of 
that since added, so far as they are not quoted from others, 
I am alone responsible. 

For these sentiments, however, I can lay no claim to origi- 
nality. The ground has been often traversed before ; though, 
so far as I have dealt in controversy, I have endeavored to 
place the merits of both sides of the question in dispute in a 
juster light than is done by the extreme partisans of either. 
I have made copious references to my authorities, in the hope 
that those interested in the subjedt will follow up the reading 
of much that want of space compelled me to omit. In 
making up my account of the English schools, I have been 
able to embody in my pamphlet but a tithe of the interesting 
and valuable material that may be found buried in the folios of 
the original Report. 

In taking upon myself the ungracious part of an advocate, 
I have had to lay grave charges of negled: and imperfection ; 



vi PREFACE. 

but I have endeavored, I hope not unsuccessfully, not to appear 
insensible to merits as well as defeds. That the schools and 
Universities of England, w^ith all their shortcomings, have yet 
done a great work in the jDast, no one can be so blind as to 
deny ; no one, with any love of good learning, can be insensible 
to the influence of all the venerable associations that cluster 
round them. As seats of learning and centres of thought, 
they possess a power which hardly any amount of abuse or 
mismanagement can wholly deprive them of. Efnollit t7tores^ 
nee sinit esse feros, may be said of any course of liberal 
study, however antiquated or perverse. A mere residence at 
Oxford or Cambridge, one would think, should be a liberal 
education ; and it may often be worth a young man's while to 
undergo any amount of useless drudgery, rather than miss the 
refining influence of the only higher intellectual training 
within his reach. My argument has only been that such a 
price should not be exa6ted of him. 

But neither will it, I hope, be laid to my charge, because I 
have undertaken here to defend the interests of science, that 
I am insensible to the glory and beauty of the literatures of 
Greece and Rome, or to the splendor of their immortal story. 
That is a cause which will never lack defenders more eloquent 
than I am : yet, in one sense, I can claim that I too am its 
defender ; for surely he may be reckoned among a cause's best 
friends who strives to protect it from perversion and abuse. 

It has been my chief objedl to place before readers who 
will not have access to a document not likely to fall into the 
hands of many in this country, the very surprising pidure of 
the great English schools which it contains, — schools, some 



PBEFACE. vii 

of which, at least, would seem at the present time to answer 
hardly any other purpose than that of serving as the demon- 
stration, by a redudio ad absurduj7z, of the insufficiency of 
a one-sided and obsolete system of education. If I shall 
thereby contribute in any degree to the great work of building 
up a more perfect and more truly liberal one in this coun- 
try, where, comparatively untrammelled by old ti'aditions, we 
have a fairer field for experiment, I shall be abundantly 
rewarded. 



Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 21, 1S65. 



CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 



I HAVE ventured, gentlemen, to offer, this evening, to draw 
away your attention from the special topics which usually 
occupy you here, to the great general topic, in which, as 
engaged in a new educational enterprise, we are all interested, 
— the topic of scientific education. You are about to organize a 
new institution, differing in many of its features from any other 
in the community : it seems fit, that, while doing it, you should 
view it in all its relations to the insti'umentalities already exist- 
ing. Have we a national system of education already com- 
pletely organized ? If so, in what relation does our enterprise 
^tand to it? if not so, what bearing will it have on the solution 
of an undetermined problem ? We cannot isolate ourselves if 
we would. Our institution must stand in some relation, true or 
false, to other agencies at work in different parts of the same 
great field. It is important that that relation should be a true 
one, and that the enterprise should be undertaken with wide 
and just views of the whole problem. Whatever light we can 
get from other systems and experiments, successful or unsuc- 
cessful, should be welcome. 

Our President has recently made a thorough personal exami- 
nation of those European schools of science which most near- 
ly resemble, in their purpose and obje6ls, the one you are about 
to inaugurate ; and the benefits of his well-known skill and 
ability will soon be apparent in the organization of your school. 



10 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

It has seemed to me, that we might derive some instrudlion 
from the examination, not only of those institutions which 
resemble, but of those also which differ most widely from, the 
one you are establishing ; and that I could spend a profitable 
hour by bringing up the question here, which still plays so 
important a part in educational discussions, of the relative im- 
portance and relative position in modern education of the study 
of Physical Science, and the study of the ancient languages of 
Greece and Rome, which have so long formed the staple of the 
only education that has been called "liberal," — a well-worn 
question, I am aware, but one which from time to time will 
still present itself, to be passed upon anew in the light of the 
demands of new circumstances, and of the fresh conquests with 
which Physical Science, almost from day to day, astonishes the 
world. 

In our noble system of elementary public schools, free alike 
to the children of rich and poor, white and black, foreigner and 
native, we have laid a foundation for the education of the peo- 
ple such as never was laid by any nation before ; and though I 
think that many defedls remain to be corredled, and much is 
still to be done before that system will develop all its power, 
yet, in the light of the great events that have been going on 
round us, the blindest cannot fail to see how much it has 
already accomplished to establish firmly the foundations of 
popular liberty, and to elevate us in the scale of nations. But 
the same attention does not seem to me yet to have been paid 
to the problem of adjusting our higher institutions of learn- 
ing to the wants of a new people, and the circumstances of new 
times. That such adjustment is needful ; that though learning 
be one, yet the instrumentalities by which it is promoted must 
vary with the times, and be adapted to the wants of the nation 
to be instructed, — will not, I presume, be questioned. But 
ovir higher institutions of learning are not of home-growth, but 
borrowed from England ; a kindred nation, it is true, but one 
whose social system differs so widely from ours that few of her 
institutions can be adopted by us without modification. Yet, 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 11 

while we have laid the broad foundation of a universal educa- 
tion of the people, such as England has yet hardly begun to 
dream of, in our higher institutions of learning, we have bor- 
rowed from her, almost unchanged, that narrow theory of a 
liberal education which is based exclusively upon the study of 
the Greek and Roman classics. It is to the question of the 
relation of this theory to American education that I wish to 
draw your attention. 

But I should not, perhaps, have been tempted into so old a 
controversy, if there had not fallen in m}- way a document 
which seems to me to throw a new and most extraordinary 
light upon the whole subjedl. It may be known to you, that 
in England, in the year 1861, partly in consequence of severe 
strictures on the condition of Eton School, which appeared in 
the public prints,* a Parliamentary Commission was appointed 
to investigate the condition, not only of that great classical 
school, but of eight of the most important of the other so-called 
Grammar Schools of England ; namely, the three other most 
aristocratic of these institutions, Harrow, Winchester, and 
Rugby, together with the old classical foundation of Shrews- 
bury, in the west of England; and Westminster, St. Paul's, 
Charterhouse, and Merchant Taylors', all in the city of London. 
Why tliese last were specially seledled from the numerous 
other foundation-schools of England, does not appear. In 
1864 that Commission made a Report, which I have studied 
with considerable care ; and I propose to read to you an account 
drawn from it of the present state of public-school education 
in England, so far as it is exhibited in the condition of the 
schools examined, with special reference to the question which 
most nearly concerns us, — as to the place which the teaching 

* Chiefly, if we may believe the "National Review," in consequence 
of the controversy which arose from some severe articles which appeared 
in the early numbers of the " Cornhill Magazine," by the " well-known 
and energetic reformer," who signs hAxa^iXi '■'■ Paterfamilias.'" I do not 
know who Paterfamilias is. The articles are well worth reading. 
" Cornhill Magazine," vol. i. p. 608; vol. ii. p. 641 ; and vol. iii. p. 257. 



12 CLASSICAL ANB SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

of science should hold in an enlarged and liberal scheme of 
modern education. 

Now, we are not at present in very good temper with our 
English brethren, and with ample and just reason ; and there- 
fore not, perhaps, disposed to do justice to their real merits :. 
but I think we may at any time allow, that Englishmen can chal- 
lenge the world, not only in the magnitude of the abuses they 
tolerate, but also in the thoroughness with which they investi- 
gate these abuses when once they set about it. Whether they 
are equally thorough in applying the remedy may perhaps admit 
of question. But the doings of this Commission are no excep- 
tion to the rule of English thoroughness. The Report and evi- 
dence I have before me in four folio volumes, containing two 
thousand pages, in double columns of fine print. The Com- 
mission, which consisted of the Earl of Clarendon, the Earl of 
Devon, Lord Lyttleton, the Hon. Edward Twisleton, Professor 
William H. Thompson, and Henry Halford Vaughan, Esq., 
held a hundred and twenty-seven meetings, examined at very 
great length a hundred and thirty witnesses, and personally 
visited all the schools ; though an application from them for 
permission to examine the boys was met by a eivil but per- 
emptory refusal from all but one or two of the head-masters. 
I think there is hardly any question that can well be con- 
ceived, from the quality of that roast mutton to which, for 
centuries, Eton Collegers have been doomed for five da3's in 
the weekly seven, and the strength of the beer with which 
they wash it down, up to every possible inquiry respeding 
the history, income, revenues, and course of study of each 
school, that will not here be found answered ; and, in addition, 
and what is perhaps the most valuable part of the whole, there 
is a great body of evidence from men of the highest eminence, 
called to testify to the general questions relating to the state of 
English education. It will readily be believed, that it is a very 
valuable contribution to the literature of education. My read- 
ing on the subjed: has been pretty extensive ; but I have rarely 
seen any thing that goes so diredlly to the heart of all questions 



CLASSICAL AXB SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 13 

that should interest a person engaged in such studies at the 
present day. 

I shall not detain you with a description of these great 
schools.* Old charitable foundations, some of them with a 
somewhat monastic chara6ler, they have been diverted almost 
entirely from their original purpose, and are now, and notably 
Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and Winchester, — to which four I shall 
chiefly confine my remarks, — great boarding-schools, where 
the sons of the English aristocracy and wealthy classes are pre- 
pared, or supposed to be prepared, for the Universities of 
Oxford and Cambridge, or diredtly for the different spheres 
of English aristocratic life. The splendid buildings of Eton 
are well known by description, and have doubtless been visited 
by many here present. 

Not to detain you, then, with a description in detail, I pass 
at once to the question which immediately concei-ns us ; 
namely, What is the charadler, and what the quality, of the 
education given to almost three thousand of the sons of 
the English higher classes in these great and ancient and 
richly endowed! institutions? As they are the most prominent 
and wealthiest, it is to be presumed that they are, if any thing, 
above the average of many others of a similar chara6ler which 
are scattered over England. Will you permit me to answer it, 
by first asking, in a few words. What ought to be that educa- 
tion, and then examining in detail how far the adlual edu- 
cation answers to the ideal? 



* For some details, see Appendix I. 

t Richly endowed, though the dishonest manner in which the in- 
crease in the revenues of Eton, arising from the rise in value of its enor- 
mous landed property, has for a long series of years been diverted from 
its true objedl into the pockets of the Provost and Fellows, would be 
difficult to believe on any less conclusive evidence. That the first 
offenders were conscious of wrong-doing seems pretty evident, from the 
careful manner in which they concealed the statutes. Their successors 
have pleaded the excuse which in England covers such a multitude of 
sins, — prescription. One Provost, before his death, returned a large sum 
to the College. 



14 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

A pradlical psychology, founded on a true indudlive observa- 
tion of the phenomena of the human mind, such as should 
guide us in an a p?'iori investigation of such a question, is yet 
to seek ; * but I shall assume as axioms one or two propositions 
w^hich you at least will not be disposed to question. I shall 
assume, that, in the science and art of education, we must study 
and follow nature, and that we shall only be successful so far 
as we do so. I shall assume, that there is a certain natural 
order in the development of the human faculties ; and that a 
true system of education will follow, not run counter to, that 
order. I shall assume further, that, in the absence of any nicer 
classification, we may roughly divide the faculties of the mind, 
for purposes of education, into observing and refledlive ; and 
that, in the order of development, the observing faculties come 
first. And again, t shall assume, though the point has been 
disputed,! that individual *minds come into the world with 
individual charadleristics ; often, in the case of superior minds, 
strongly marked, and qualifying them for the more successful 
pursuit of some one career, than of any other. Finally, I shall 
assume, without stopping to qualify the statement, that the 
study of the phenomena of the material world may be said to 
be the divinely appointed instrument for the cultivation and 
development of the observing faculties ; while the study of the 
immaterial mind, with all that belongs to it, including the study 
of language as the instrument of thought, is the chief agent in 
the development of the reflective faculties. 

This being premised, let us next inquire, from a pradlical 
rather than a theoretical point of view, what we should natur- 

* I cannot make an exception in favor of the empirical system of 
Phrenology, though I believe it has served to draw attention to import- 
ant but negledled principles in educational philosophy. The attempts 
of the German philosophers, Herbart and Beneke, to apply psychology 
to education can hardly be said to be know^n outside of their native 
country. 

t As, e.g., by Dr. Johnson, who maintains, in his " Life of Cowley," 
that genius is only great general power, " accidentally determined " in a 
particular direction. All experience proves the contrary. 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIEXTIFIC STUDIES. 15 

ally expect as some, at least, of the results of die education of a 
young English gentleman entering one of these magnificently 
endowed institutions at the age of ten, and leaving at the age 
of eighteen or twenty for the university* or the world ? He 
enters it at an age, when, as we have assumed, the observing 
faculties are most a6tive in their efforts to develop themselves. 
He doubtless finds there, to meet that want, the amplest provi- 
sion which wealth can furnish for the pradlical study of out- 
ward nature, and for gaining at least an elementary knowledge 
of the wonderful laws by which the Creator governs the 
universe, in the shape of apparatus, laboratories, instruments, 
libraries, and teachers trained to use them. He is doubtless 
taught, as a discipline of the mind, to know and classify the 
living creatures round him, and to understand the phj'sical phe- 
nomena in the midst of which he lives and has his being. The 
future citizen of one of the leading industrial nations of the 
world, himself perhaps heir to some great landed estate of vast 
natural resources, or to some great manufadturing establishment 
which has laid the foundation of his family's wealth and con- 
sequence ; at any rate, the probable future legislator for these, 
— he will naturally be instrudled in all those departments of 
science which have any bearing on these, which will help 
him to govern and guide them successfully, or to legislate 
for them intelligently. Born within that charmed circle 
from which the rulers of the people are drawn, he will begin 
to be instructed betimes in all that relates to the history, 
government, and politics of his own and other modern 
nations ; a citizen of a great commercial nation, he will be 
taught something of the laws which control the distribution 
of wealth ; the inhabitant of an island whose sails are found on 
every sea, and whose trade reaches to the ends of the earth, 
he will be well instru6led, at an age when such insti-u6tion is 



* In 1861, 558 out of 1,674, oi* exadllv one-third of the under-gradu- 
ates of Oxford, and 305 out of 1,483, or nearly one-fifth of those of Cam- 
bridge, were from public schools. 



16 " CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

most easily imparted, in the geography, physical and political, 
of the globe he inhabits. Born heir to the noblest language 
and the richest literature of modern times, he will of course 
be carefully taught, from the very outset, to speak and write his 
mother-tongue with accuracy and ease ; and, at the age of eigh- 
teen or twenty-one, he will be well acquainted with the great 
writers, in prose and poetry, who have adorned it. Connedted 
closely with the nations of the continent, and likely, from his 
wealth and position, to be a traveller in after-life, he will be 
well acquainted with one or more of the leading continental 
languages, so as to read them readily, and perhaps even speak 
them fluently. Finally, an heir to wealth, with perhaps un- 
limited means at his command of gratifying his tastes, a foun- 
dation will surely be laid for the study and appreciation of the 
fine arts, by a careful cultivation of eye and ear, by drawing 
and music. 

I will not exhaust the catalogue ; but is not some or all of 
this, or the beginning at least of all this, what we have a right 
to expert from a young man of twenty, educated at these great, 
wealthy, and time-honored institutions, in order to satisfy that 
ideal of an education which Milton himself has drawn for 
them. " I call, therefore, a complete and generous education" 
— the words have been quoted a thousand times before — "that 
which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnani- 
mously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and 
war"? 

And now, gentlemen, though I am sure that the answer I 
am about to make to the question. How much of this is actually 
realized by these great schools? will create no little astonish- 
ment, I shall not give you the opportunity to suspe(5t me of 
exaggeration ; for I shall make no statement that is not fully 
supported by the document before me. 

And as we have assumed it as an axiom in education, that 
the observing faculties are the first to be developed, and as 
boys enter these great schools at the very early age of eight 
or ten, let us first inquire how the case stands in regard to 
physical science. 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIEXTIFIC STUDIES. 17 

The account of the study of physical science at Eton is as 
brief as that famous chapter in Horrebow on the snakes in Ice- 
land. The Rev. C. O. Goodford, the Provost, testifies in these 
words: "Physical science is noi taught;" and, a little further 
on, " There is no apparatus for experiments in natural philoso- 
phy, &c." We turn to Winchester, and the evidence of the 
Rev. Dr. Moberly, head-master, is the same ; to Harrow, and 
read, " Physical science does not form any part of the regu- 
lar studies of the school ; " to Westminster and Merchant 
Taylors', with the same result : and it is not till we come to 
Rugby, where we should expe6l more enlightenment, that we 
find any attention paid to the subjcdt, beyond a voluntary 
attendance on a few ledlures ; and, even at Rugby, it holds a 
very inferior place, counting little or nothing in the scale by 
which rank is determined, and therefore not really looked upon 
as a part of the serious work of the school. 

The light in which modern science is viewed by the body of 
schoolmasters who govern these schools, is curiously brought 
out in the cross-examination of the Rev. George Moberly, for 
twenty-seven years head-master of Winchester. He says : — 

- It is plainly out of the question, that -\ve should teach chemistry, 
astronomy, geology, &c. All that is, in mv opinion, possible, and there- 
fore desirable, to attempt, is that a course of ledtures on each of the chief 
subjeAs of science in turn should be delivered in the school annually. 
... A few boys, who intend to pursue it in any way, either as amateurs 
or professionally, may get assistance from these ledtures. An amateur of 
a science is the better for knowing the elements of it; and every man 
of liberal education is the better for not being ignorant of any thing : 
but, compared with other things, a scientific fadt, either as conveyed by a 
lefturer or as reproduced in examination, is a fadl which produces noth- 
ing in a boy's mind. It is simply a barren fadt, which he remembers, or 
does not remember, for a time ; and which after a few years becomes 
confused with other fadls, and is forgotten. It leads to nothing; it does 
not germinate. It is a perfedlly unfruitful faft. . . . Such instrudlion is 
worthless as education. ^. Are the physical sciences not of value 
as a discipline of the mind .'* Ans. I hardly know 'what their value is. 
I do think it is very desirable that young people and old people should 
know these things. I think they are matters of accomplishment and 
knowledge which everybody should know something of. But as a mat- 



18 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

ter of education and training of the mind, which is our particular duty 
as instructors, I do not feel the value of them. ... If we were going to 
make chemists, we would educate them in that way; but we want a gen- 
eral education, which will be introdudlory to other things, — things 
which would be of more general value : i/iese things give no power. 
(Vol. iii. p. 344, et seq.) 

Upon being afterwards asked whether he does not "think that per- 
sons Avho have had a philosophical education are sometimes persons 
whose general powers of mind would lead him to believe that such an 
education goes beyond a knowledge of fa(5ls, — that it also leaves power 
and a high state of education generally," — he answers, that there cer- 
tainly are scientific men of high capacity, and that he should wish any 
one who had praditcal views before him to cultivate those studies ; but 
he seriously objedls that modern science, w hardly yet seventy years old.* 

Here, then, a surprising fadl meets us at the outset. In the 
great schools of England, in the middle of the nineteenth 
century, the whole of modern physical science, one-half of 
knowledge as we just now divided it, — the whole study of the 
outward world, — is, I do not say, pursued imperfedlly : it is not 
pursued at all ; it is absolutely ignored as an essential part of 
education : and a head-master of twenty-seven years' standing 
can be found who says he thinks that as a training of the mind 
it is worthless ! — it gives no power ! We shall, by and by, 
see what the most eminent of English men of science think on 
that subjed. 

If we turn now to the study of the modern languages of 
Europe, we find this to be the Commissioners' account of the 
study of French at Eton : — 

' M. Tarver, the single teacher of French at Eton, . . . has no recog- 
nized position in the school, other than that of " a person holding the 
privilege to teach French," and describes himself — not untruly, as it 
seems — as "a mere objct de luxe. . . . He reckons his average attend- 
ance, which is mostly from the Fifth Form, at eighty, or about one- 
tenth of the school. . . . Whilst the number who learn is small, the 
teacher is embarrassed by obstacles which, from no fault of his, largely 
frustrate his efforts to teach. The study of French is comparatively 
useless, if not steadily kept up. Being optional at Eton, it is not pur- 
sued continuously, but by fits and starts ; and, as it involves an extra 

♦ See his evidence more at large, vol. iii. p. 343, et seq. 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIEXTIFIC STUDIES. 19 

expense to the parents, and to the boy a sacrifice of some hours of 
play, we are not surprised to find that the attendance is often greatly 
reduced by the most trivial reasons. Being excluded from the school- 
work, it wants almost entirely the indispensable stimulus of reward and 
punishment. . . . French is not required, nor under the present head- 
master allowed, to assist a boy's rise in the school. 

The opinion of the present head-master (the Rev. Mr. Balston) on 
this subjecfl was expressed very distinctly in his examination : — (Lord 
Clarendon.) Would it not be considered necessary by the authorities 
of Eton to render obligatory a thing which they think ought to be a 
part of an English gentleman's education.' — I should not. You would 
not consider it necessary to devote any part of the school-time to its 
acquisition? — No, not a day. 

You do not intend to do so.' — No. 

Do you not think that it is a matter which a boy should be required 
to learn.' — He ought to learn French before he came to Eton, and we 
could take measures to keep it up as we keep up English. 

What measures would you take to keep up French.' and, I may add, 
what measures do you now take to keep up English at Eton.' — There 
are none at present, except through the ancient languages. 

You can scarcely learn English reading and writing through Thucy- 
dides.' — No. 

(Sir S. Northcote.) You do not think it is satisfa(5tory .' — No: the 
English teaching is not satisfactory; and, as a question of precedence, I 
would have English taught before French. 

You do not consider that English is taught at present.' — No. (Vol. i. 
p. 84-5.) 

The number of boys who learned German was twenty, out 
of seven hundred and eighty. The Italian master, Signor 
Volpe, reports himself as having three pupils. He apparently 
does not look for any such good fortune as to have pupils ; but, 
in an amusing letter to the Commissioners, in rather imperfe(5l 
English, he begs that he may have a room of his own allowed 
him, when he comes down from London, to fut his head in 
when it rains. At Winchester, forty boys out of one hundred 
and ninety-seven learned German ; but more attention was 
paid to French, though it counted nothing for promotion. At 
Harrow, the study of modern languages has been compulsory 
since 1851, and it counts something for rank: but it is not till 
we come to Rugby that we find a real attention paid to modern 
languages as an integral part of a good education ; and even 



20 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

there they are still in an inferior position, and the results are 
reported as very imperfe(5l. 

Here, then, we find the study of modern languages ranging 
through different degrees of imperfedlion ; from absolute and 
almost ludicrous failure at Eton, up to something like a proper 
estimation at Rugby, but everywhere* subordinate, and every- 
where with imperfedl results ; and one head-master declaring 
that, if he could have his way, they should not be studied at all. 

We come now to the study of the mother-tongue and its 
literature ; a tongue which, if it had not paramount claims as 
the mother-tongue, would be second to none in power, or in the 
value of the treasures it contains. What encouragement is 
given to young English noblemen and gentlemen to master, and 
learn to appreciate, the language of Shakspeare and Milton 
and Bacon? We have already seen the importance attached 
to the study of English by that wonderful man, the head-mas- 
ter of Eton. He would have the boys' French kept up by the 
same measures by which their English was kept up ; and, upon 
being pressed as to the measures by which English was kept 
up, it turned out that there were ?to measures, except the inci- 
dental one of translating from the ancient languages, which he 
had to confess was a very unsatisfadlory measure, and in which 
it turns out afterwards that no pains is taken with their Eng- 
lish at all. Here, then, is a pendant to the ideas respedling 
science of one head-master, in the ideas respedling English 
of another. French and English, according to the evidence of 
Mr. Balston, are treated with perfedlly impartial, because abso- 
lutely complete, negle6l ; and, if we pass to the other schools, 
the case does not anywhere seem to be much better. A good 
deal of evidence was taken as to the tastes of the boys, as 
shown in their private reading ; and here is a sample of it. It 
is from the evidence of Mr. Mitchell, a student at Oxford, who 
had just left Eton, after being there six years : — 

Was there a good deal of private reading in general literature, as far 
as you know, at Eton? — I think very little. 

There was no general desire for information? — No. 



CLASSICAL AXn SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 21 

It was not considered any part of business or pleasure at Eton to 
keep up a reading of the general knowledge of the day? — No : I do not 
think so. (Sir S. Northcote.) Did the}' read newspapers? — I think 
those who belonged to the debating-society [twenty-eight in number] 
read them. I do not think the other part of the school did. (Mr. 
Thompson.) Do you think the majority of the boys had read the 
greater part of Sir Walter Scott's novels.? — I do not know; I should 
think they had probably. Do you think they had read the principal 
poets, such as Shakspeare.' — I do not think they read Shakspeare. 

Much less Milton, I suppose? — No : I do not think they did. 

They were obliged to read him a little, were they not, for verses? 
— Yes. 

But, beyond reading over the passages set for Greek iambics and 
hexameters, you do not think Milton and Shakspeare much read? — No, 
I do not. 

Would 3'ou say that the modern poets are read ? Did you ever hear 
of any one reading Coleridge? — Some boys do; but I think, as a rule, 
most boys read nothing at all except novels, and books of that sort. 

What sort of novels, — serial novels? — Yes. Thackeray's? — Yes. 

Or would that be too difficult? — I do not think Thackeray is read 
very much. 

Lever, perhaps ? — Yes. 

(Lord Clarendon.) Bulwer? — Yes. 

(Mr. Thompson.) They do read a great many novels? — Yes. 

(Mr. Vaughan.) How do they get the novels that they read? — They 
buy them ; and then they pass about the house, from one boy to another. 

It is the cheapness that determines the book seledled, to a certain 
degree? — Yes, I think so. 

The railway editions of novels, perhaps?* — Yes. (Vol. iii. p. 249.) 



* That it was not always so at Eton is proved by the interesting 
evidence of Mr. Coleridge, a nephew of the poet, and for thirty-two 
years a master. He says : " Formerly, any average boy of ordinary 
taste at Eton, on leaving school, had read much of the English poets, 
and a great deal of English history, as well as other literature. I know 
very well that the boys used greedily to devour every poem of Sir 
Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Southey, and other modern poets, as fast as 
they came out. I recoUedl that there was a perfeA rush to get the first 
copies of the ' Corsair.' The boys used to spend a great deal of their 
pocket-money in buying English books : . . . we had them in abundance. 
The old English dramatists, a great deal of Dryden, a great deal of 
Pope, and an immense deal of other English poetry, were then read at 
Eton, besides most of the modern poems ; but now I doubt whether you 
would find many boys out of the whole eight hundred that Eton con- 
tains who have read ten plays of Shakspeare." 



22 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

Scott and Thackeray, then, being somewhat above their 
level, it turns out that yellows-covered literature is the staple 
reading of the boys at Eton ; as one might suppose it would be 
in a school presided over by the Rev. Mr. Balston. Mr. 
Kitchin, Censor of Christ Church, testifies that a tolerable 
acquaintance with English literature is very rare among the 
young men who come to his college. 

Let us turn now to the fine arts. I suppose all will 
acknowledge, that the discipline of the eye by drawing, and of 
the ear by music, are rapidly passing out of the list of elegant 
and ornamental superfluities into that of the necessary elements 
of a complete and harmonious training. One would think that 
in schools frequented by the children of an aristocracy, if 
nowhere else, special attention would be paid to them, if only 
as luxvn-ious accomplishments beyond the reach of the vulgar. 
Yet at Eton, the most aristocratic of schools, though there is a 
drawing-master, and though, more fortunate than the unlucky 
Italian master, he has a room, and even some casts and 
models, the average attendance on his instru6lion is thirty-five 
out of seven hundred and eighty-three. Music is not taught at 
all. In the report on Winchester, no mention is made of 
either. At Harrow, music and drawing are extras, studied by 
eighteen and fifty, respectively, of the four hundred and sixty- 
four boys. Even at Rugby, the numbers are only forty-nine 
and forty-two in four hundred and sixty-five. This, then, is 
the amount of attention paid in these great schools to the fine 
arts, and to the cultivation of eye and ear. 

Geography, after a little elementary instrudlion, is wholly 
negle6led. Attention is paid to ancient history at some 
schools, in connexion with classical work : but at Winchester, 
Dr. Moberly says, " we do not profess to teach modern history 
at all ; " and the case seems no better at the other schools, 
though no such open confession of failure is made. 

I have thus gone over nearly all the list of studies which 
we assumed to be such as ought to enter into the education of 
an English gentleman ; and thus far, you observe, with next to 



CLASSICAL AXL> SCIEXTIFIC STUDIES. 23 

no result. What, then, do these great schools teach? I need 
not give the answer. In place of all these, they teach Latin 
and Greek ; and, subordinate to these, mathematics. To these 
three studies, or rather to two, Latin and Greek, almost the 
whole teaching force of these great institutions is applied. Of 
the thirty-five masters at Eton, twenty-four, or about seventy 
per cent, are classical ; eight are mathematical ; and t/irce teach 
all the modern languages, physical science, natural history, 
English language and literature, drawing and music : and this 
is about the proportion in all save Rugby, where matters are 
somewhat better. 

And the defenders of the classical system of education main- 
tain that this is all as it should be. Classics, and, in a very 
subordinate degree, mathematics, are the divinely appointed 
sharpeners of the human intellect. The mind won't cut till it 
has been ground on what a facetious Scotch schoolmaster* calls 
the " gerund-stone." It is in vain to attempt to teach boys any 
thing, say the advocates of this system, till their minds are 
disciplined ; and the only mental discipline for boys is Latin 
Grammar, and then Greek Grammar, and a little mathematics. 
When they know all about the Greek accents, and the perfedl 
passive participle, and the doclrine of the subjundlive mood, 
and the choruses in Sophocles, they may, with some propriety, 
begin to inquire why a stone falls to the ground, or what is 
meant by the carboniferous formation, or what are the merits 
of a republican form of government, or any other merely utili- 
tarian piece of knowledge. To judge by the manner in which 
they have lately been handling that last problem, one is forced 
to conclude, that even the adult English aristocratic mind has 
not yet got through with its preparatory grinding. 

Let us for a moment examine this argument ; for it still 
plays an important part in educational controversies, and is the 
main subject I propose to illustrate in this discourse. I shall 



* D'Arcy W. Thompson, in his genial and scholarly "Day-dreams 
of a Schoolmaster." 



24 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

assume as granted one of those axioms with which I set out ; 
namely, that in the art of education we must study and follow 
nature as our guide. How, then, if this be true, will the case 
stand as to Latin Grammar? Clearly, if it is the divinely 
appointed food for the youthful mind, there will be developed, 
at about the age of eight or ten, a strong love and aptitude for 
it ; and this will be indicated by the zeal with which children 
will enter upon its study the moment it is presented to them, 
and the ease and pleasure with which they will master it. It 
will be absorbed, so to speak, at every mental pore ; and 
their intelledls will visibly enlarge under its benign and nour- 
ishing influence. They will leave their dinners to study the 
subjundive mood, and cry to sit up nights, that they may 
master the gerund in dum, and the periphrastic conjugations, 
and the mysteries of protasis and apodosis ; and, as a natural 
consequence, we shall abound in admirable young Latin and 
Greek scholars, to whom not a nicety of expression nor a 
shade of meaning in those languages will be unknown. 
Beginning at eight, and continuing the study uninterruptedly 
till twenty-one or twenty-four, without the distradtion of any 
moi"e vulgar studies to interrupt their entire devotion to their 
obje6l, they will, of course, both speak and write the Latin and 
Greek languages with fluency and ease ; and will be familiar 
with all the beauties of the great authors of Athens and Rome, 
whatever they may not know of the great authors of England. 
And, when the time for science does come, these minds, so 
long and so admirably sharpened, will cut into its profoundest 
depths, and know its utmost secrets, as if by intuition : at 
least, if they do not know them thus, there will be but little 
time left for learning them in any other way. Whether this 
proves to be the result, the evidence of men eminent in science 
will presently show. 

.^ But how does the case really stand in regard to this 
natural love of the boyish mind for Latin and Greek ? Alas ! 
the dogs-eared and dirty gi'ammars — amo, a?nas^ whipped, 
so to speak, into the wrong end of the person, because it finds 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 25 

such difficult entrance at the right, — seem to point to a differ- 
ent conckision. And at this very time, when, according to 
theory, there should be such an aptitude for Latin Grammar, 
what do we find, if we show our youngster an air-pump, 
explain to him the working of a steam-engine, set him upon 
colle6ting birds' eggs,, or unfold to him the wonderful struc- 
ture of an insert? — why, tlie liveliest curiosity and interest 
in our teaching. Boys are not mere animals, to wlK)m all 
sorts of intelleftual effort are equally repulsive. That is a 
theor}^ of boy-nature, which is the worthy and necessary com- 
plement of the grindstone tlieory of instrudlion. Give a boy 
the food his mind really craves, and you will find him an 
intelledual being. 

What, then, is the moral? Why, that air-pumps and birds' 
eggs, steam-engines and buttei-flies, are factors in education 
equally with the Latin Grammar ; and that, in a true order 
of development, they precede the Latin Grammar : in other 
words, that the observing faculties are not developed in the 
same way and by the same means as the reflective ; and 
that the observing faculties are developed before the re- 
fle6tive. This is sad heresy, gentlemen, in the ears of our 
classical pedants ; but I cannot help it. Nature will have 
it so. 

Now this being so, ■^— and I do not see how any one can well 
dispute it, — is it natixral to suppose that a system which care- 
fully keeps from the minds of boys that mental food they crave, 
and insists upon supplying only that which their minds most 
strenuously reject, can be followed by good results? Do we 
know better than nature? And will not the depriving of their 
observing faculties of their natural development, when these 
faculties are strongest, and the premature development of their 
reflective faculties at an age when they are weakest, be likely 
to produce dwarfed or distorted minds? and, when that process 
has been carried on for several years, shall we be likely to 
mend the matter by then attempting to cultivate the observing 
faculties, just at the period when nature meant that the reflec- 
3 



26 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

tive powers should come into play, and take their first and 
strongest outgrowth? Yet, preposterous as it seems, this is, 
as I propose to show you, a favorable view of what in Eng- 
land is called a liberal education. What its results are, we 
shall also see. 

I am aware that I am saying what it will be very easy to 
misunderstand ; and I desire, therefore, to add, that I say it as 
a defender, not an opponent, of classical studies. I think the 
time is not coming, and that it would be unfortunate if it 
should come, when classical studies will be altogether aban- 
doned. They must always hold an honorable place, and play 
an indispensable part, in any far-reaching and wide-embracing 
scheme for a liberal and generous education. But classical 
studies will not be really aj^preciated, or take their true place, 
or develop the vast educational powers they really possess, till 
they are relieved of the degrading task to which they are now 
universally put, of serving as the intelledlual whetstone upon 
which to attempt to sharpen little boys' wits. 

I will add further, that I think it is not too much to admit, 
that the defenders of the classical theory have heretofore had 
greatly the advantage of their opponents, in the line of argu- 
ment they have taken in defence of their favorite studies. 
Disagree with them as you may as to v\^iat studies go to make 
up a liberal education, you must yet go to them for a true defi- 
nition of that training of mind in which a liberal education 
consists. The advocates of science have been too prone to 
confound education with information, mental training with 
" useful knowledge : " they have lost sight of that liberalizing 
development of all mental powers which constitutes a true edu- 
cation, and which no mere pouring in of any amount of useful 
information cart ever accomplish. " It is not a little curious," 
says Mr. Pattison, in an admirable paper in the Oxford 
Essays,* " in reviewing the controversy on classical education. 



For 1855. 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 27 

which has been going on for the hist fifty years, to note, that, 
though the inevitable progress of things is gi^adually but 
silently giving a preponderance to the modern sciences, the 
advantage has, till quite lately, been with the defenders of 
"classical studies. The untenable position of the public schools 
and universities has been supported by the classicists on a true 
principle, while the sound cause of scientific knowledge has 
been mostly argued by the naturalists on a folse one. The 
classicists have not only written well, and brought out in a 
clear light many of the secondary benefits of the dead -lan- 
guage training, but they have held to the fundamental idea of 
intelledlual culture as the great end of education. Their error 
has been their not understanding that the study of antiquity, of 
the past, even when much more profound -than it usually is, 
cannot noiu convey that culture. Their opponents, on the 
other hand, in the free possession and enjo3'ment of that 
wonderful field of real knowledge, have lost sight of the 
truth, that, for the purposes of education, knowledge is 
only a means, — a means to intellediual development. 
They will stake the issue on the comparative tdility of the 
classics and of science ; whereas they ought to place it on 
the comparative fitness of the two subjects to expand the 
powers., to qualify for philosophical and comprehensive 
views." 

This seems to me to be eminently true ; and I am quite 
ready to admit, that I know of no definitions of education that 
can compare, in justness and breadth of view, with those given 
by some of the defenders of classical studies. In the old con- 
troversy between Oxford and the " Edinburgh Review," in 
spite of the power of Brougham and the wit of Sidney Smith, 
the vi6lory, it seems to me, for this reason really remained with 
the defenders of the old system.* And if I were asked to point 



* See in particular tlie "Remains of the Rev. J. Davison," or his 
admirable article on R. Lovell Edgv(rorth's foolish book on Professional 
Education, in the " Quarterly Review^" for 1811. 



28 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

out the modern books on education which are marked by the 
truest appreciation of that wherein a real training of the mind 
consists, I should have to mention, among the foremost, the 
writings of such men as that arrogant but able scholar, the late 
Dr. Donaldson ; and the leftures on University Education of 
Father Newman, the excellence of which, I may say in pass- 
ing, is wholly due to the early Protestant training of their 
acute and able author, — their greatest defedl, the attempt to 
bluing down his thought to the level of his new creed and his 
uncultivated audience. 

I am willing, then, to draw my definition of education from 
my opponents ; but I do it only to turn it upon themselves. 
Granting their ideal of a liberal education to be the true one, — 
and I grant it cheerfully, — their means of realizing it are 
utterly inadeqviate. The end of education being, as they say, 
a true and symmetrical mental development, the means must 
be something of far wider application and greater power than 
the grammar of two dead languages. Let us adopt their 
ideal, then, but seek out better and more adequate methods 
of realizing it. But, to omit altogether the training which 
the study of language gives, would be to err as gravely, and 
to show ourselves as one-sided, as our opponents. And the 
study of the classic languages of Greece and Rome, in their 
proper place and at their proper time, must always take a 
prominent part in linguistic training. The place, the time, the 
proportion in which they should enter into diflerent schemes of 
teaching ; the part they should play in the teaching of language 
itself, — are questions of detail, on which I will not enter here. 
I desire only to express my convidlion, that there is no neces- 
sary antagonism between science and classical study ; that both 
are needful fadtors in a wide-embracing system of liberal edu- 
cation ; that it is the preposterous abuse of classical study, and 
the absurd negleft of science, that we have to consider and try 
to remedy ; and further, that, considered as instruments of men- 
tal discipline, there is surely no necessary connection between 
classics and thoroughness, science and superficiality, though in 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 29 

all discussions this seems to be taken for granted b_v the advo- 
cates of classical studies.* 

It is curious to revert to the times when these same classical 
studies, now become the chief staple of what may be called the 
orthodox education of the day, were themselves considered 
the worst of heresies, and decried by conser\^atives as an inno- 
vation destruftive of all sound learning ; and to observe what 
an exaet parallel there is between their treatment and the treat- 
ment which science, as an instrument of education, receives 
now. " For above two hundred years," says Mr. IJallam,t 
speaking of the University of Paris, in the middle of the fifteenth 
century, "the scholastic logic and philosophy had crushed polite 
letters. . . . When the concession [that the »ew studies should 
be taught] was made, the teachers of Greek and rhetoric were 
specially excluded from the privileges of regency by the faculty 
of arts. These branches of knowledge were looked upon as 
unessential ap.pendages of a good education, very much as the 
modern languages are treated in our English schools and uni- 
versities at this day. A bigoted adherence to old systems, and 
a lurking relu(5tance that the rising youth should become supe- 
rior in knowledge to ourselves, were no peculiar evil spirits that 
haunted the University of Paris, though none ever stood more 



* In the whole mass of writing in favor of classical studies, it is more 
difficult to find any thing approaching to the nature of an argument than 
one would suppose. Such writing usually consists in a panegyric on the 
beauty of the classic poets, — which no one is. disposed to deny, — and a 
disparagement of the study of science as the mere cramming of 
utilitarian facfls, — which serves only to show the writer's ignorance 
of the true nature of scientific studies. The distinftion attempted to be 
drawn by Dr. Whewell, in his work on a Liberal Education, between 
" permanent" and " progressive " studies, and the argument he attempts 
to build upon it, seems to me, with all deference to the opinions of a 
writer of such eminence, more fanciful than sound. The reader may 
compare with it the opinions of Professor Owen. (Appendix, p. io6.) 

t Hallam's History of Literature, i. 123, Paris ed. See also, on this 
subjedt, Raumer Geschichte der Padagogik, i. sec. 3 ; and Schmidt, 
Gesch. d. Pad., ii. 336, et seq. But the classical education of Eton would 
have made Erasmus stare. 

3* 



30 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

in need of a thorough exorcism. For many years after this 
time, the Greek and Latin languages were thus taught by per- 
mission, and with very indifferent success." 

But opposition to the new studies was vain. At the time of 
the revival of letters in Europe, in the fifteenth century, the 
study of classical literature opened a new career to minds that 
had so long been pent up within the narrow bounds of the 
mediaeval philosophy. We cannot wonder at the impulse 
which was given to the intelle<5l of Western Europe by the sud- 
den revelation of a world of thought rich in all the elements 
that were wanting in the dry and barren schoolmen. But the 
position of the classics is now reversed, and their relation to 
the learning of the present day is precisely the relation of 
scholasticism to the thought of the fifteenth century ; and just 
as scholasticism, merging all of truth that it contained in a 
wider philosophy, had to submit to the abandonment of its 
monopoly, and to become only an insignificant element in a 
wider curriculum, so the pedantry of classical learning must 
disappear before that wider modern study of language which is 
fast taking its place ; while language itself, however important 
it may be as an element, — and no one can dispute its import- 
ance, — must yet content itself with forming only an element in 
an education which must find a place in its wide-embracing 
scope for the whole extent of modern science. Nothing short 
of this can put it in a true and living relation to the wants of 
the times. To continue to employ the classical languages as 
the sole instruments of teaching, is as impossible as it would 
be to return to stage-coaches in these days of steam. " The 
best form of discipline," say the Commissioners, " may not be 
the same in the nineteenth century as it was in the sixteenth ; 
and the information which will be serviceable in life is sure to 
be very difl!erent. Hence no system of instruction can be 
framed which will not require modification from time to time. 
The highest and most useful oflice of education is certainly to 
train and discipline ; but it is not the only office. And we 
cannot but remark, that, whilst in the busy world too great a 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIEXTIFIC STUDIES. 31 

value is perhaps sometimes set upon the acquisition of knowl- 
edge, and too little upon that mental discipline ^vhich enables 
men to acquire and turn it to the best account, there is also a 
tendency which is exadlly the reverse of this, and which is 
among the besetting temptations of the ablest schoolmasters ; 
and that, if very superficial men may be produced by one of 
these influences, very ignorant men are sometimes produced 
by the other." (Vol. i. p. 30.) 

I am combating, then, neither classical nor linguistic studies, 
which I value, and whose true power I have had some oppor- 
tunity to obsei"v'e, but only the abuse of classical studies. I do 
not know whether I am addressing any gentleman who has ever 
been engaged in classical teaching. If I am, it may have been 
his experience, as it has sometimes been mine, to take a lad 
wht) has at a rather late moment determined to prepare himself 
for College, and whose mind, instead of having been previously 
dosed ad nauseam with grammars, has had a healthy develop- 
ment through employment on more congenial studies. I think 
he will agree with me, that a year at the age when the powers of 
refledtion and abstraction begin to strengthen ; when the ration- 
ale of the laws of speech can be appreciated, and language can 
be viewed, not as a tedious mass of dead words, but as the liv- 
ing instrument of human thought, — that a year spent upon the 
classics at that age by a young man who knows his own and 
perhaps some other modern language, is worth any three of 
previous life for such studies. " We do amiss," said Milton 
long ago, — and Milton was a learned classical scholar, — " we 
do amiss to spend seven or eight years in scraping together so 
much miserable Latin and Greek, as might be learned other- 
wise easily in one year." 

I do not believe the grindstone theory. I am not going 
to dispute the doftrine, that some studies have a greater dis- 
ciplinary value than others,* though the relative disciplinary 

* See on this point an excellent note in Sir William Hamilton's " Dis- 
cussions," p. 705, Am. ed. I do not wish to dispute the justice of the 



32 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

value of different studies remains, I think, still in great 
degree to be ascertained by careful experiment and observa- 
tion ; and it w^ould be about as reasonable to attempt to 
cultivate a farm with a pickaxe, as to educate all the 
faculties of the mind by one study alone. But the implied 
dodtrine of our classical extremists is, that there is one set of 
studies for discipline, and another set for use ; and that the 
disciplinary value of a study is always in inverse ratio to its 
pradical value for the purposes of life, and vice versa. Now, 
if you will allow me to use a homely illustration, suppose we 



distindlion there drawn between such studies as consist chiefly of "results 
to be taken on trust " from the few students who are in position to make 
such subjedts a specialty, and such studies as adlively exercise other 
powers than the memory; as, e.g., to use the author's illustration, "the 
rational study either of the grammar of a known language, or of univer- 
sal grammar illustrated by the languages with which a student is 
acquainted." It were better if this last study, " an applied logic and 
psychology," which Sir William declares to be wholly neglected at 
English universities, were more attended to at our own. It is because 
Physical Science has been so little looked upon as also an applied logic 
of the most valuable kind, that its educating value has been overlooked. 

What Professor Goldwin Smith says ("Ledlures on History," I. p. 27) 
of the subjects of higher education is true to a great extent of all educa- 
tion, that, to be available for teaching, such subjedls " must be traversed 
by principles, and capable of method ; either a science or a philosophy, 
not a niere mass of fadls without principle or law : " which last is the 
classical pedant's idea of physical science. 

I think it is Dr. Acland who raises the question. Which is the more 
valuable of the two as to educating power, — the rational study of lan- 
guages, or the inducftive study of physical science .'' But not to urge, that, 
as employing to a great extent different faculties of the mind, the two 
studies may almost be said to be incommensurable, and that to speak of 
any educational instrumentality as of universal application is, as I have 
said, almost as absurd as to speak of a universal tool, it may certainly 
be maintained that the question will not be ripe for decision till science 
shall have been employed as long, and with as perfecft means and appli- 
ances, as has the study of the ancient languages. Then it will be found 
that both language and science are equally indispensable to a perfecfl 
education. 

On the educational value of the Physical Sciences, see Whewell, Phil. 
Ind. Sc, ii. 359. 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIEXTIFIC STUDIES. 33 

were to say to a penny-postman, ''IMy good friend, you do very 
wrong to start out on your daily task of delivering letters, so 
early in the morning, without a previous ivalk for exercise" 
— our postman would be very apt to say, " My dear sir, I get 
mox"e than enough exercise in the course of my daily duty." 
"Oh, but" — we can imagine the rejoinder — "that is mere 
vulgar, useful labor ! You should spend the whole morning, 
and a good part of the forenoon, in purely disciplinary exer- 
cise of your legs ; then, towards the middle of the day, you 
might begin to deliver your letters with some prospccSt of doing 
it seczmdum artem." I fear our postman would argue, that, if 
the Creator had intended so much time to be occupied in fruit- 
less preliminaries, he would have made the hours of daylight 
longer. Yet this is hardly a caricature of the defence of 
classical studies we sometimes hear. As if, the moment there 
were the least prospedl of a study becoming practically valu- 
able, it thenceforward became worthless for mental discipline ! 
As if there were one set of studies whose whole use was to 
sharpen the mind, and then another whose sole value consisted 
in their subservience to the vulgar, utilitarian purposes of life ! 
You, gentlemen, who know something of the intimate connec- 
tion which exists between the profoundest problems of pure 
science and the homeliest details of every-day practice, will 
believe in no such theory. It is a theory which betrays its 
parentage. It can come only from a country where the 
privileged classes, born to great wealth, and thus above the 
necessity of labor, desire to possess some shibboleth of their 
order, too costly and difficult of attainment to be within the 
reach of the man born only to useful toil and the divine neces- 
sity of working for the good of his fellow-men ; and that shib- 
boleth they get from a study, — not even a real and profound, 
but a useless and superficial study, — during all the years of 
youth and early manhood, of two ancient languages, to the 
almost complete exclusion of every other subjedl. Classical 
studies are not to be defended, at least in a republic, upon any 
such theory at this. If they are valueless in themselves, they 



34 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

had better not be vised for discipline : if they have an intrinsic 
value, — and, in their proper place and time, I maintain that 
they have the highest intrinsic value, — it is upon their real 
merits that they mvist claim a place in a true system of educa- 
tion. Practical usefulness, — and by that term I do not mean 
the mere vulgar stomach and pocket filling with which it is so 
often confounded ; but practical usefulness in a high and gen- 
erous sense, the serving of all noble and worthy objedts, the 
endeavor to make our earth a better dwelling-place, and man 
a nobler dweller on it, — pradical usefulness in this sense 
should be the very aim of all our teaching ; and study can 
never lose sight of it without most imminent peril of becom- 
ing worthless for discipline as well as for use. 

If, then, you should advise our imaginary postman to exer- 
cise his arms, to develop symmetrically, as far as possible, all 
the muscles of his body, I should not have a word to object. 
My point is only this, that the delivering of letters itself has a 
disciplinary value for the legs, as well as a pecuniary value for 
the pocket; and, quoad hoc^ he can combine discipline and 
duty together. For I believe 'God meant that our whole life 
should be an education, our daily labors should be disciplinary ; 
and so, instead of degrading liberal education down to the level 
of a vulgar utilitarianism, I would elevate the idea of life to the 
height of a true liberal education. Then, no matter how soon 
we begin to combine these ideas together. But can sttch a 
liberal education be formed out of Greek and Latin Grammars 
alone ? * 

But to return to our schools. If every thing save mathe- 
matics is sacrificed, as we have seen it is, to the indispensable 
disciplinary Latin and Greek, we shall at least have thorough 
and accurate classical scholars. If the mathematics, more 



* A late writer (Fornereau, "Diary of a Dutiful Son") sa.ys>, with 
more wit than science, "Most men seem to consider their school-learn- 
ing as if it were like a tadpole's tail, meant to drop oft' as soon as the 
owner came to full growth." 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 35 

fortunate than physical science, have a recognized, though an 
inferior place in the curriculum, we shall at least get good 
mathematicians. Let us, then, examine the results in classics 
and mathematics. 

The study of mathematics is a modern innovation. " Before 
1836," the Report says, " there was no mathematical teaching 
of any kind at Eton : " it did not become part of the regular 
school business till 1S51 ; and the following story would be 
incredible, if it did not rest upon the authority of Professor 
Key, of University College, London. I find it in the evidence 
of that eminent physiologist. Professor W. B. Carpenter : — 

"I remember hearing Professor Key. of University College, mention 
that he had in early life a private pupil who had gone through the com- 
plete Eton course, which at that time was only classical. Even ordinary 
arithnietic was not taught, much less any mathematics ; and he hap- 
pened to find out accidentally, that this young man, an intelligent young 
man in other respedls, not only had never learned his multiplication- 
table, but did 7iot knovj there was such a thing as a multiplication-table. 
He was buying several pairs of silk stockings in a shop; and, to find out 
how much he had to pay, he was adding the price of one pair to the 
second pair, and that to the third pair, and so on. When he found how 
much his labor would be facilitated by the multiplication-table, he 
applied himself to master it, and learned it off in a few days with the 
keenest pleasure." (Vol. iv. p. 36S.) 

This was the state of things in the largest of these schools 
within the recolledlion of a man of middle age. Mathematics 
do now, however, form an integral, though still a very subor- 
dinate, part of the course of instrudlion. The mathematical 
masters at Eton are to the classical in the proportion of eight 
to twenty-seven ; they do not wear the same costume, and have 
not the same power over the boys : one of them complains 
rather bitterly that the older boys themselves have more power 
than they. The subjedl does not count so much for rank, and 
in every way the boys are taught to look down upon the study 
as of quite inferior importance. It is no great wonder, there- 
fore, that the results are reported as far from satisfa6lory. The 
attention given to the subje<5l at the other schools varies ; but 
. in none is it on a par with classics. At Westminster, the 



36 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

classics count as two-thirds, and all other studies as one-third ; 
and promotion is not given at all for proficiency in mathemat- 
ics. At Harrow, mathematics were not introduced till 1845 ; 
and it takes four mathematical marks to equal one classical 
mark. At Rugby, three and a half hours per week are devoted 
to the study, and it stands to classics as twelve to seventy- 
eight ; and all the great prizes are for classical proficiency. 

We are reduced at last, then, to Latin and Greek alone. 
Surely we shall have classical scholars. The percentage of 
time devoted to classical study in all these schools is so great 
that it is hardly too much to consider them the sole instrument 
of education. If, in addition to that, you consider that rank 
in the school is almost exclusively determined by it, and the 
prizes to be gained by rank, both at school and at the univer- 
sities, are many and very valuable, you will see that the whole 
arrangement has the efle6t of an enormous system of bounties 
for the encouragement of this one branch of study. Here, 
then, if anywhere, we shall find results that bear some propor- 
tion to labor expended and opportunities enjoyed. 

Now, it would be absurd to deny that all these great schools 
do send up to the Universities a certain number of pupils with 
as thorough a training of its kind as can well be. given. 
Whether it is the best kind, even of classical ti-aining, we shall 
presently inquire. Certainly no one will undertake to deny 
that England contains good scholars. But the education, gen- 
tlemen, of the able minority is never a true test of the worth of 
a system or of the character of a school ; for the able minority 
is made up of those minds of native strength and originality 
that will get themselves an education without a system, or in 
spite of the worst of systems. If to these you add a certain 
number of drudging pedants, who will, at any rate, load their 
minds with learned lumber, and to whom the quality of the 
lumber is indifferent, provided it leads to the desired fellowship, 
you can have a show of success for any large school, how- 
ever bad it may really be. But the true merits of a school are 
determined by what it does for the great mass of average 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. ' 37 

minds. Does it truly train and educate them ? is the question ; 
and, viewed in this light, all the evidence goes to show that the 
English classical system is a portentous failure. 

I do not state this as a mere opinion. It is the inevitable 
conclusion to be drawn from the evidence itself. The Com- 
missioners, a(5ling upon the principle that a tree is known by 
its fruits, very properly summoned before them tutors and ex- 
aminers from the various Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, 
to testify as to the state of preparation in which the young men 
came up to those Universities ; and these gentlemen tell a very 
lamentable story. Here are some specimens of their evi- 
dence. 

The tvvo Colleges at Oxford which receive the great ma- 
jority of Eton boys are University and Christ Church. Of 
University it is said by the " London Review," that for the last 
ten years the average number of men from this College who 
attain a first class in classics has not exceeded otie in a year. 
" Its whole vital enei'gy is exhausted in producing this unit ; 
and even that unit is not always an Etonian." And the fol- 
lowing is a part of the evidence of the Rev. Charles Sandford, 
Senior Censor of Christ Church. That of the Dean was quite 
as unfavorable. 

" Some fifty or sixty young men matriculate at Christ Church in the 
course of each year. Of these, perhaps ten will read for honors in 
classics. Such men would be able to construe with tolerable correiflness 
a new passage from any Latin and Greek author, translate a piece of 
easy English prose into tolerable Latin, and answer correctly simple 
grammatical and etymological questions in Latin and Greek. The other 
forty or fifty -would not. In fadt, very few of those who are merely can- 
didates for matriculation can construe with accuracy a piece from an 
author whom they profess to have read. We never try them in an un- 
seen passage. It would be useless to do so. They are usually examined 
in Virgil, ^n. I. —IV., and Homer, I. II. — IV. . . . We do not test their 
knowledge of ancient or modern history, or of geography, at matricula- 
tion. We examine them in arithmetic, but not in Euclid or in algebra. 
Their answers to the questions in arithmetic do not encourage us to 
examine them in Euclid or in algebra. . . . Very rarely is any one heard, 
in the public examinations, to translate fluently into good English. 
This is no doubt owing partly to the universal use of translations, partly 

4 



38 • CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

to the little weight attached by the examiners to this faculty." (Vol. 
ii, p. lo.) 

The Rev. G. W. Kitchin, the Junior Censor, says, "Of the ordinary 
men a quarter might possibly steer their way through an unseen pas- 
sage in Greek with fair success. Rather a larger number might manage 
an ordinary piece of Latin. Tolerable Latin prose is very rare. Per- 
haps one piece in four is free from bad blunders. A good style is 
scarcely ever seen. The answers we get to simple grammar questions are 
very inaccurate. In arithmetic they have improved, as it is now under- 
stood that they cannot pass responsions without it. We do not examine 
for matriculation in any of the other subjedts mentioned. . . . While 
youths of the age of eighteen (our average age at matriculation) have 
in other institutions already chosen their course of life, and are begin- 
ning to prepare for it, our men have the duty of making such a choice 
almost concealed from them, — certainly never insisted on by the Uni- 
versity course of studies ; nor do they enjoy the stimulus of knowing 
that what they are doing will diredlly affect their future career. They 
work to pass certain examinations ; they pass, and in a short time forget 
the cram — it is often little else — on which their indifferent minds have 
been employed." (Vol. ii. p. 12.) 

The Rev. James Riddell, Tutor of Balliol College, says, " Five-sixths 
of the pupil-teachers in schools, receiving aid from Government, are 
better rea'ders than five-sixths of the men who come to the University. 
Again, in one of the examinations in Literis Humanioribus, in which I 
was an examiner, nearly half of the passmen who came under my notice 
were imperfedt speller's." (Vol. ii. p. 16.) 

The Rev. W. Hedley, Tutor of University College, and Public Exam- 
iner, says, " I am sorry to say, that many boj^s come to the University 
from school, knowing next to nothing. ... I have sometimes had to 
remind my brother examiners and myself, in ike fi7ial examination for 
B.A., that we were not at liberty to pluck for bad spelling, bad English, 
or worse writing. . . . Hitherto it has seemed useless for the University 
to enlarge her course to suit the tastes of men whose minds have never 
been formed at all by any methodical teaching, and who really cannot 
be said to have any tastes. ... It is difficult to say what proportion of 
candidates for matriculation can translate a new passage of a Latin or 
Greek author. At my own College, we consider such a test much too 
severe : the College would be left half empty, if it were insisted on. . . , 
Of arithmetic and mathematics few of them know any thing more than 
the amount insisted on by the University, and many of them barely 
that; the extent of their knowledge not reaching beyond vulgar fracflions 
and decimals. . . . Their acquaintance with history is very meagre, and 
so exceptional that, where it does exist, I should be induced to attribute 
it more to domestic training and individual taste tharf to the systematic 
teaching of schools. Much the same may be said of geography. (Vol. 
ii. p. 17.) 



CLASSICAL AND SCIEXTIFIC STUDIES. 39 

The Rev. W. H. Girdlestone, of Christ's College, Cambridge, ^ys, 
"To the latter portion of the question I consider myself to be a living 
answer. For eighteen years, I have found employment in supplementing, 
as a private tutor, the deficiencies of school-education, and in teaching 
the simplest rudiments of arithmetic, algebra, and elementary mathe- 
matics, and in preparing in Latin and Greek candidates for the previous 
examination and ordinary degrees ; and I cannot but think that I have 
to teach them nothing but what they ought to have been thoroughly 
taught at school. ... I may call attention to the facft, that, for the last 
two years, rather more than one-third of those who entered at Trinity 
failed at the first entrance examination. With regard to arithmetic, I 
can testify, from my own experience, to the almost universal ignorance 
of the simplest first principles of the subjeft; and may state, that, at the 
previous examination in October, 1S62, there were eighty-six decided 
failures in arithmetic and algebra out of two hundred and sixty candi- 
dates ; while, in the examination for the ordinary degree, in June, 1862, 
one examiner found in the translations from the Greek author mistakes 
in spelli7ig in the papers of ninety-one candidates out of one hundred 
and sixty-one." (Vol. ii. p. 30.) 

Charles Neate, Esq., M.P., Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, says, 
" There are now so many things which a tolerably educated man ought 
to know, that there is not room for Latin and Greek, at any rate for both 
of them, unless they can be taught in less time than the}^ are now. Yet 
these languages are now so ill taught, or at least are so little known by 
the great majority of those who are supposed to have learnt them, that 
half the time now bestowed upon their acquisition would be a great deal 
too much to give for the result obtained. 

With reference to this latter point, I do not hesitate to say, that the 
great majority of those who take a degree in Oxford, after having spent 
ten or twelve j'ears of their life in the all but exclusive study of Latin 
and Greek, are unable to construe off-hand the easiest passages in 
either language (if they have never seen them before) ; and that their 
Latin writing is almost invariably such as would, under the old school- 
system have subjected them to a flogging, as boys of t^velve years old ; 
and those who take first classes often make such mistakes as make it 
difficult to understand how they ever got simply a degree." (Vol. ii. 
p. 49.) 

In the examination of the head-master of Eton, there occurs the fol- 
lowing passage : — (Lord Clarendon.) The Dean of Christ Church 
says, that boys come up from Eton who are not only not proficients, 
but who are in a melancholy state of deficiency in respect to classical 
learning. — (Mr. Balston.) This may be ; and, if so, there is need of 
improvement. 

(Lord C.) Nothing can be worse than this state of things, where we 
find modern languages, geography, history, chronology, and every thing 



40 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

elsejvhich a -well-educated English gentleman ought to know, given up, 
in order that the full time should be devoted to the classics ; and, at the 
same time, we are told that the boys go up to Oxford, not only not pro- 
ficient, but in a lamentable state of deficiency with respedito the classics. 
— (Mr. B.) You asked me what my opinion was, and I was stating what 
. I thought I should be jible to do. — (Lord C.) What we are now aware 
of is this : that at present the whole time of the boys is devoted to 
classics; notwithstanding which, we have the principal of one of the first 
Colleges in Oxford telling us, that, generally speaking, almost all the 
boys come up in a melancholy state of deficiency in respedt to these 
classical attainments; and that, among those so painfully deficient, Eton 
stands prominently forward. 

(Mr. B.) I am sorry for it.* (Vol. iii. p. 114.) 

And here is the guarded conclusion of the Commissioners 
themselves ; and the more weight should be attached to it, as, 
throughout this Report, they show themselves exceedingly 
cautious and moderate men : — 

"If a youth, after four or five years spent at school, quits it at nine- 
teen, unable to construe an easy bit of Latin or Greek without the help 
of a dictionary, or to write Latin grammatically; almost ignorant of 
geography, and of the history of his own country; unacquainted with 
any modern language but his own, and hardly competent to write 
English corredlly, to do a simple sum, or stumble through an easy prop- 
osition of Euclid ; a total stranger to the laws which govern the phy- 
sical world, and to its structure; with an eye and hand unpradtised in 
drawing, and without knowing a note of music; with an uncultivated 
mind, and no taste for reading or observation, — his intellecflual educa- 
tion must certainly be accounted a failure, though ther-e may be no 
fault to find with his principles, charadter, or manners. We by no means 
intend to represent this as a type of the ordinary produ(5t of English 
public-school education ; but, speaking both from the evidence we have 
received, and from opportunities of observation open to all, we must 
say, that it is a type much more common than it ought to be." (Vol. 
i.p.31.) 



* Trevelyan, the clever author of a recent entertaining work on India, 
the "Competition Wallah," says, "Of two hundred scholars who leave 
Eton in the course of the year, it is much if some three or four can con- 
strue a chorus of Euripides without the aid of a translation, or polish 
up, with infinite pains, a piece of Latin prose, which a Roman might 
possibly have mistaken for a parody of the De Ofliciis, composed by a 
Visigoth in the time of Diocletian." p. 434. 



CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 41 

The public, if we may judge from its various organs ot 
opinion, has gone a step farther than the Commissioners, and 
has accepted this pidlure as a type of the ordinary produ6l of 
EngHsh public-school education, at least in regard to Eton, 
which, though the largest and richest, is certainly the worst of 
the schools. 

Here, then, is a ridiculous failure even in. the classical 
teaching itself; and though the general cause of it has been 
already indicated, in the view we have been taking of what 
constitutes a true and natural education, yet the immediate 
causes of such a lamentable result seem to deserve a mo- 
ment's further examination of the nature of the classical 
teaching itself. For it cannot be denied, that, though classi- 
cal study alone can never form a complete and perfect mental 
training, yet, in skilful hands, it may be made the means 
of a very tolerably good one. Let us imagine a school ship- 
wrecked on a solitary island, or walled up in some old monas- 
tery, and thus cut off from all knowledge of modern life and 
access to modern literature ; but with a cargo of Greek and 
Roman authors, and a sufficient supply of dictionaries, gram- 
mars, and other illustrative and critical apparatus. Surely, 
good teachers should make something of them. With the 
grammars of two kindred languages, and with a knowledge of 
their own (perhaps this last is too great an assumption), they 
could teach something of the philosophy of speech, and make 
their pupils understand that grammar is no arbitrary matter, — 
the work of old Lily, or of any Connedlicut schoolmasters, 
— merely to be crammed into the memory as a collection of 
dead, arbitrary males ; that grammar was not made first, and 
then the language made to fit it, — as one might suppose from 
the way languages are usually taught ; but that as language is 
the divine and wonderful instrument of thought, so grammar 
is, or should be, the philosophical analysis of that instrument, 
and thus the ground-work of an exposition of the laws of 
thought. Highly abstract as the study is in its very nature, 
yet it can be taught intelligently, if pains enough be taken, 



42 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

even to children, though whether it should be is open to grave 
doubt.* Let any one take a tolerably clever child, and first 
making one grand bonfire of all the school grammars that can 
possibly come within his reach, — and, if certain grammars 
that I might name were among them, I would make the fire 
tenfold hotter, — let him proceed to analyze to him the first 
half-dozen sentences the boy utters, carefully abstaining from 
pedantic technicalities, and he will have gone a great way in 
laying the foundation of grammatical knowledge ; and, with a 
little skill, he can carry the process a great way further before 
the child need even hear of those terrors to the youthful mind, 
Lindley Murray and his successors. And what shall hinder 
our imaginary teacher from continuing the process, and teach- 
ing the laws of Greek and Latin Grammar pradlically and 
rationally, even though it were as yet too much to expedl that 
he should be master of that new science of Compai^ative 
Philology, which is destined sooner or later to revolutionize 
our teaching. Once taught to read the languages of Greece and 
Rome, our shipwrecked boys would have, in the subject-matter 
of the classic writers, material for the exercise of their faculties 
in very vai'ious diredlions. They could learn history from 
Herodotus, Livy, and Thucydides ; politics from Aristotle ; 
eloquence from Demosthenes ; and philosophy from Plato. 
The politics, to be sure, would be antiquated ; the morals, un- 
christian ; -f- and the progress the world has made in eighteen 



* Ovir excellent Dr. Benjamin Rush, in the "Observations on the 
Study of the Latin and Greek Languages," to be found in his Essays, 
says (p. 45), " Sancho, in attempting to learn to read by chewing the four 
and twenty letters of the alphabet, did not exhibit a greater absurdity 
than a boy of seven or eight years old does in committing grammar- 
rules to memory, in order to understand the English language." The 
learning a language by attempting to learn all its grammatical minutiae 
Jirs^, has been aptly compared to the attempt to teach a child to walk 
by sitting down and attempting to teach him the anatomy of the muscles 
of the legs. 

t It might be a curious question to investigate what effect the exclu- 
sive study of the Greek and Latin classics has had in the political 



CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 43 

centuries would all have to be ignored. They could even 
acquire some rude notions of physical science, and the begin- 
ning of classification in natural histoiy, from Pliny and 
Aristotle ; and in Euclid they would have a geometry not yet 
superseded. In the careful practice of turning Greek and 
Latin into good idiomatic English, they would have, not the 
best certainly, but a very good training in their n^other-tongue. 
And in the study of the severe beauty of the Greek poets, they 
would have a discipline of their taste, such as perhaps no other 
literature can give, — provided always they ever attained to 
such proficiency in the language as would enable them to 
appreciate its more delicate graces ; a proficiency really at- 
tained, I presume, by about one in ten thousand of those who 
study the language. 

I have gone into this little sketch because it is precisely the 
way in which the classics are not taught in the great schools 
of England. First, for the elements of Grammar,* we are 
told by the University examiners, that they are not learned 
at all. Next, for the subjedl-matter of the classical writers, we 
have the evidence of no less a man than the famous Master of 
Trinit}^ Dr. Whewell, — and he is the more impartial witness, 
as, though eminent as a man of science, he is a warm upholder 
of real classical study, — that the subjedl-matter of the classical 
writers is called " cram," and is wholly negleded ; and, 
finally, various witnesses testify that little if any pains is taken 
to form a good English style, by the careful and elegant 
translation of Latin or Greek into English. You will begin 

thought of Europe. The eminent French economist, Bastiat, has, 
written an ingenious pamphlet — " Baccalaureat et Socialisme " — to 
show the pernicious influence they have exerted on French political 
speculation, particularly as exhibited at the time of the first French revo- 
lution. {(Euvres, tome iii.) And see also his lively letter on founding a 
classical College at Bayonne (tome vii). 

* The Eton Grammars are so bad that they find no sale outside the 
walls of Eton itself. "We affirm without the least hesitation," says 
an English critic, "that the two Eton Grammars are marked by almost 
every fault under which such treatises can labor." 



44 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

to ask in despair, What, then, do the boys learn? The 
answer is brief, and it is this, — that their chief mental occu- 
pations are, first, the committing of a quantity of Greek and 
Latin vei'se to memory, so great that Dr. Acland, another emi- 
nent witness, calls it " frightful ; " and, secondly, the manufac- 
turing themselves of vast quantities of Greek and Latin verses, 
or what are called verses ; which is usually done with the help 
of a " Gradus," and, in point of educational value, is about 
on a par with the operation 6f turning the handle of a barrel- 
organ, 

I feel that I ought to sustain such statements by evidence. 
The following is from that of Dr. Whewell. Sending, along 
with his communication, a copy of his able work " Of a Liberal 
Education," he says : — 

"I have also made various remarks on the defedlive characfler of 
the classical teaching of our great schools ; the whole attention of the 
scholar being employed in obtaining a knowledge of the language of 
the classical author, with no attention to the ^natter. I have made 
these remarks in the first part, and have noticed the manner in which 
schoolboys in these days ridicule all knowledge of the matter of books 
as cram. In the second part, I have quoted the testimony of an 
eminent person, formerly a classical medallist, to the truth of the pic- 
ture which I had drawn, of the narrowness of the scheme of classical 
scholarship prevalent in our great schools. 

" I have ventured further to say, that, though to write Latin frose is a 
necessary part of scholarship, to write Latin verse is not equally neces- 
sary. The very great amount of time and care which is bestowed upon 
this accomplishment is disproportioned to the value of it as a condition 
and element of an exacfl knowledge of the Latin language. Probably 
many of the best Latin scholars who have ever lived would not write 
Latin verses so classical in their tone and measure as some of our Eton 
schoolboys. Still more are the writing of Greek prose and Greek verse 
accomplishments which are not necessary to the scholar; * and it cannot 
be doubted, that a most exadt knowledge of Greek may exist in persons 



* I find the following striking corroboration of Dr. Whewell's state- 
ment: Porson, perhaps the greatest Greek scholar the English ever 
had, -was not at all distinguished at Etott. " He was inaccurate in his 
prosody, — a fatal defetil ; and his Latin verses, almost the only road 
to distindlion, were never remarkable." — '^ £tontana," in Blackwood, 
March, 1865. 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 45 

who could not fluenth- translate Addison into Greek prose, or Pope into 
Greek verse. 

"The great amount of time and attention M'hich is bestowed upon these 
accomplishments in this University has, I think, an unfavorable effedl 
upon the knowledge of classical literature which our scholars acquire ; 
and I think that the same must be the case at our public schools where 
this kind of exercise is cultivated. Our scholars call it, I find, composi- 
tion. The result of its occupying so much of their time is, that they 
bestow comparatively little of their time and thoughts upon the reading 
of Greek and Latin authors with a view to their matter. They are 
much better acquainted with the Greek and Latin written by themselves 
and their companions, than with any Greek and Latin written by ancient 
authors, except the few who are seledled as models of style or sources of 
phraseology."* (Vol. ii. p. 43.) 

The charadler of much of this Greek and Latin composition 
may be estimated by the evidence of another sensible witness, 
Archdeacon Denison. In a paper suggesting improvements in 
the present methods of instru(5tion, he says : — 

"I should discard the practice of Latin-theme writing. Few things 
so intrinsically absurd have, I think, been imported into school-teach- 
ing. For it calls upon boys to do two things at once which are not 
compatible : 15/, To think out a subjecft ; id, To express their thoughts 
in a language other than that in which they think. The result is, as a 
general rule, what might be expelled, that they do neither the one nor 
the other moderately well, and that so many themes begin with omnes 
homines, and struggle on through fourteen gasping and despairing lines 
to faciunt. 

" Now, if the principal use of an exercise be to make a boy think, he 
should be allowed to express his thoughts in the language in which he 
thinks. The result of any other requirement is only unmeaning plati- 
tudes and poor and stunted expression. If, on the other hand, the use 
be to teach a boy the idioms and the elegances and the p.ower of 
another language, or even to familiarize him with the words of it, this 
is best done by translation ; well done by written translation ; better 
done by oral translation. 



* The reader who would see Dr. Whewell's views more at large is 
referred to the above-named work, " Of a Liberal Education," and 
especially to the chapter on Classical Educational Studies (p. 78), and on 
the Great Classical Schools (part ii. p. 63, edition of 1850). See also his 
Ledture in the volume of Ledlures on Education, delivered at the Royal 
Institution in 1854. 



46 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

" The same, mutatis mutandh, for Latin and Greek verse-writing. To 
call upon all the boys of a school to exercise imaginative power, which 
most of them do not possess, in the poetical garb of another language, 
with which they are at the best very imperfedlh' acquainted, is only an 
ingenious device for exposing dulness and incapacity, and a temptation 
to hate poetry altogether." (Vol. ii. p. 50.) 

Mr. Twisleton interrogates the Rev. Mr. Oakes, one of the 
masters at Eton, as follows: "Was it not the case, that, 
among the boys, taking say one hundred boys, there would 
be a large proportion who possessed no turn for Latin compo- 
sition?" and the answer is, "A great proportion of them." — 
" So that," Mr. Twisleton continues, " if the time of one 
hundred boys were taken up by Latin composition, there 
would be a sacrifice of a great number of boys to the attain- 
ment of excellence in some," — excellence, you. observe, in 
writing, not English prose, but Latin verse. But Mr. Oakes 
can only say, " As a matter of discipline^ I doubt whether it 
would be well to give it up." 

Mr. Walfoi'd, another Eton master, testifies, "We negle6l, to 
a very great extent, the careful analysis of the argument and 
the digesting thoroughly the subjedl-matter of the books we 
read ; " in other words, they are in the habit of reading Latin 
and Greek books without understanding their meaning. And, 
as if this were not enough, he goes on to say, that no attention 
is given to nicety "of translation ; and then that the boys would 
learn more, if it were not for what he calls the " thoroughly 
established practice of allowing them to come into school 
with the English translation, written word for word over the 
Latin atzd Greek." Anybody who has ever heard a boy 
attempt to recite an ill-understood lesson from what we in 
Cambridge call a " pony," can understand their state of intel- 
ledlual development, and their style of English composition, 
after several years of such discipline. Absurdity could hardly 
be carried further, and we no longer wonder at the evidence of 
the Oxford tutors. 

But while the subjeft-matter of classical literature is thus 
negleded, and exadness and elegance of translation into Eng- 



CLASSICAL AND SCIEXTIFIC STUDIES. 47 

lish held in no esteem, the quantity of Latin and Greek words 
committed to memory is something enormous, and ahnost in- 
credible. Dr. Moberly testifies, that he has known a boy 
repeat a whole play of Sophocles without missing a word ; 
and adds, that it secured him a fellowship. The Commission- 
ers say : — 

The quantity of Latin and Greek poetry learnt by heart is, as has 
been already stated, very large. Speaking generally, every such lesson 
which is construed is also [supposed to be] learnt by heart. A boy has 
to say eighty lines of Homer, and sixty lines of some other author, 
alternately, five days in the week. Mr. Balston sets a high value on 
this exercise of memorj', as an unfailing test of industry, and " a thing 
which they cannot get done for them at any rate." Granting this, as 
well as the great advantage both of "recitation" (properly so called) 
and of storing the memory from the classics, the question would still 
remain", whether the suggested purpose requires or is best answered by 
the repetition of three or four hundred Latin and Greek verses, and those 
only, in every week. We have reason, however, to think that even as a 
test of industry it is sometimes deceptive ; that the manner in which 
the repetition is heard by no means insures its being learnt; and that 
the quantity exacted has very often the effect of making the exercise of 
memory mechanical and slovenly, and therefore worse than useless. 
When Mr. Walter was at school, " a quick boy learned the half-dozen 
lines or so that he thought he was likely to be called up to say, and got 
off in that way." He believes that there has been a great improvement 
in this respedl; but his impression is hardly borne out by a witness 
whose experience is very recent. 

(Mr. Vaughan.) Do you know how rhany lines a week the Latin 
and Greek repetition would amount to at the top of the school, say high 
in the Fifth Form.? — I should think between two and three hundred 
lines. 

Could that be easily shirked by a boy? — Boys have very seldom 
learnt it. They have got a way of guessing the piece they are likely to 
have. 

Are they called up in order.' — Yes. 

So that they could get piping hot four or five lines, and be ready 
with it at the proper moment.? — Yes. 

Do 3'ou think that the repetition set to the boys to learn told really 
and efFedlively upon the composition, by giving taste and facility.? — I 
do not think it did. 

(Mr. Twisleton.) That could be frustrated if the masters were in 
the habit of setting on boys out of order, and dodging them.? — Yes, if 
they did not go straight through the lessons. 



48 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

(Mr. Thompson.) A master would be very unpopular if he inter- 
fered with that routine, would he not.' — He would, decidedly. (Vol. i. 
•p! 88.) 

We need not be surprised to find not only that this kind of 
classical teaching does not give any command over English, 
but to hear Dr. Acland testify that it is positively disastrous to 
classical scholarship itself. 

Our astonishment at this state of things will perhaps be 
somewhat diminished, when we read the following description 
of the mode of education and appointment of the Eton masters. 
" These gentlemen," says a late article in the " Edinburgh 
Review," * are, we believe, always seledled from King's Col- 
lege, Oxford ; that is to say, out of twenty-one masters now at 
Eton, about sixteen are King's men, as well as the provost 
and six out of seven of the fellows. It is admitted, that until 
lately the fellows of King's College were not generally of a stamp 
calculated to furnish first-rate masters for any school. f They 
entered Eton, when mere children, by favor ; they were grossly 
neglected and ill-educated while they remained there ; they 
were ele6led to King's by seniority ; and, when at Cambridge, 
they kept aloof froiri the general society and studies of the 
place, and, living in a College notorious for the laxity of its dis- 
cipline and the idleness of its members, encountered none of 
the public examinations of the University. Returning to Eton 
at four or 'five and twenty years of age as assistant-masters, 
without any knowledge of the world or experience in tuition, 
they were at once entrusted with the instruction of two or 
three times as many boys as the most practised and accom- 
plished schoolmaster would have attempted to educate else- 
where. Having themselves learnt at Eton and Cambridge 
nothing but Latin and Greek, they could teach nothing else ; 
and they consequently despised and decried all other branches 
of learning. In due course of time, other collegers, as care- 

* Vol. cxiii., April, iS6i, p. 417. 

t King's College, with a revenue of $125,000 a year, admits annually 
from Jive to twelve undergraduates. 



CLASSICAL ASD SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 49 

lessly educated by such teachers, became in their turn assistant- 
masters at Eton themselves, whilst their immediate prede- 
cessors undertook, as provost and fellows, the government of 
the College ; and thus the vicious circle has been perpetuated 
from age to age." 

But I shall expect you to begin to say : The thing is incredi- 
ble ; you are proving too much. It cannot be that this great 
number of boys should be herded together without receiving 
any education at all. Obsen'e, gentlemen, that I have nowhere 
said that these boys received no education at all ; and now, 
having gone over all the parts of that education which they 
do not receive, let me proceed very briefly to describe the 
education which they do. 

Let me premise that the moral standard, at most of these 
great schools, seems to be very high. The evidence, in the 
main, goes to show, though evidence of an opposite kind is 
not wholly wanting, that the boys are healthy, frank, manly, 
and, oh the whole, singularly free from vice. The famous 
system of " fagging," of which it was said not many years 
ago, that it was " the only regular institution of slave-labor, 
enforced by brute violence, which now exists in these islands," 
and to which may perhaps be attributed something of that 
bullying spirit and reckless disregard of right which has char- 
adlerized the ruling classes in their intercourse with other 
nations, — still exists ; but, save at one school, Westminster, 
it is stripped of nearly all its old brutality, and amounts to 
merely a wholesome supervision and prote6lion, exercised by 
the older boys over the younger, in return for which certain 
menial services are performed, of which, as the aristocracy 
seem to set great store by* their educational value, one is not 
disposed to grudge them the benefit. 

* In the " London Daily News" for June 7, 1864, may be found the 
report of a curious debate in the House of Lords, on the subject of 
the discipline of the public schools, in which Lord de Ros spoke in the 
highest terms of the benefit he had derived, while at Eton, from the 
operation of cleaning the shoes of a right reverend bishop, who sat 

5 



50 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

Now, in any great colledion of boys or young men, if the 
organized and accredited system of education should prove 
unsuitable and a failure, you may be sure that an unorganized 
and unaccredited system will be established by the boys them- 
selves. At such an age, their bodily a(5livity must have fair 
play, if their mental does not. If they are turbulent and 
vicious, they will give themselves an education in vice. If 
they are merely healthy and adlive young animals, they will 
be sure to organize a system of vigorous and manly sports ; 
and this is the real education of these great schools. The 
studies of i/ii's curriculum are, first and foremost, cricket; 
second, and hardly less important, rowing ; and, as subordi- 
nate elementary studies, racket, hare, and hounds, &c., of 
which we read such glowing accounts in " Tom Brown." You 
may smile at this as a jest ; but listen to the evidence. Mr. 
Johnson, an Eton master, testifies that cricket has become such 
a grave and serious science as to i^equire special trainers, 
professors, as it were ; and that the needful practice consumes 
twenty-seven hours per week. We shall see that another mas- 
ter puts it higher. Mr. Wolley says, that, cceteris paribus^ 
the captain of the boats or the captain at cricket is a far 
greater hero than the Newcastle scholar. Mr. Mitchell, a 
young Oxford student, lately from Eton, says, — 

"A boy has no chance of becoming one of the leading boys of the 
school by work. If he can do any thing else, — if he can row or play 
cricket, or any other athletic game, — I do not think he is thought the 
■worse of for reading." And Mr. Walford, one of the masters, gives the 
following evidence : — 

(Mr. Thompson.) Would you say, that, in fine seasons of the 
year, a boy spends more time in work or in play? — More in play, I 
should think. 

Do you know if it is the case that five hours are considered barely 
sufficient for cricket .? — I should think it was. 



opposite. The insolent self-sufficiency of the British aristocracy is 
such, in spite of disciplinary boot-blacking, that it is a curious inquiry, 
what it would have been if untempered in early youth by that useful 
economical experience. 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 51 

That a boy cannot attain the proficienc}' in cricket, which at Eton 
a boy aspires to, without five hours a day study of it ? — I should 
think so. 

How long will that boy study Greek and Latin who devotes five 
hours a day to cricket? — Not very long : there are, however, some excep- 
tions. 

Would it not require a boy of strong constitution to read six hours 
a day in the classics, after having studied five hours in cricket.^ — Yes. 

You think the masters are overworked : are the boys sufficiently 
worked? — It seems to me to be the result of our system at Eton, that an 
immense deal of work is got out of the masters, with comparatively little 
out of the boys. (Vol. iii. p. 267.) 

Did I go too far, then, in saying that this unrecognized 
education has really taken the place of the recognized one? 
One would think, that the authorities, having regard to the 
etymology of the word, had convinced themselves that a school 
was a place, not of study, but of leisure; and it is a question 
whether that is not the theory which best satisfies the demands 
of the parents themselves. " The real advantages derived 
from Eton," says the Senior Censor of Christ Church, Mr. 
■ Sandford, "is less intellectual than social education. Eton is 
expedted to make a boy a gentleman, and this expectation it 
fulfils. It may be added, that many boys are sent to Eton, not 
to learn, but to form connections." Compared with the police- 
spy systeiji of French, or the Jesuit-priest system of Romish, 
education, no one would hesitate to which to give the prefer- 
ence ; but, intellectually, do we not see its legitimate results ? 
For whence come, but from these schools, those innumerable 
English Nimrods, who betake themselves, through lack of 
intellectual culture, to wandering up and down the earth, 
destroying wild animals, lions and elephants in Africa, buffa- 
loes in.our prairies, and bears in Norway, yachting to the North 
Pole, and in a thousand ways endeavoring to work off" that 
superabundant animal life which has no intellectual life to 
balance it? Or whence comes that solid but silent phalanx of 
Tory lords and country gentlemen, who, in Parliament, so 
steadily and persistently strive to keep the world from moving, 
— who fought for the Corn Laws, fought against the Reform 



52 classicaIj and scientific studies. 

Bill, and now are fighting us, — who are they but these 
ignorant young cricketers, grown up, and not come to years of 
discretion ? 

And I might go on to ask, Who is it but the boys who 
swallow Greek plays whole for the sake of fellowships, that 
compose that Convocation of country parsons who think that 
geology tends to atheism because it contradidls Genesis, and 
even now are striving to silence Bishop Colenso and Professor 
Jowett? For, so far from this state of things in regard to the 
intelledlual education of these schools being impossible, I will 
engage, if you will give me several hundred thousand dollars to 
be expended every year in premiums on the best acquaintance 
with the words of the Chickasaw language, — if, for instance, a 
knowledge of Chickasaw words could be made to lead straight 
to -five-thousand-dollar sinecures in the Custom-house and the 
public offices, — I will engage to have half the community 
studying that aboriginal tongvie, and its teachers defending it 
(and the kindred Kickapoo diale6t) as the divinely appointed 
foundation of all human education ; and a thousand arguments 
shall be found to prove their peculiar adaptability to that 
special purpose. Now, this is just the position of the ancient 
languages in English schools and Universities. They are, it is 
true, at the other extreme of the scale of languages : they have 
an intrinsic educational value ; but their place as the sole in- 
struments of education is maintained entirely by the enormous 
system of bounties which is conne6ted with the learning of 
them. Fellowships, scholarships, church-livings, the master- 
ships in these very schools (and we have seen how lucrative 
they are), — all the means of promotion to which an English 
literary man or clergyman must look, are absolutely dependent, 
not so much upon his real knowledge of the substance of Latin 
and Greek literature, as upon his skill in making Greek iam- 
bics, or the rate at which he can grind out Latin hexameters, 
or the number of Latin and Greek verses he can repeat by 
heart. The result of repeating a whole play of Sophocles, we 
have seen, was a fellowship for life ; which was, to use Dr. 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 53 

Moberly's own words, " the prize of a struggle which was over 
at fourteen, and success in which was won, in a great measure, 
by a hard strain on a retentive memory." And Oxford and 
Cambridge are Httle more than cock-pits on a larger scale, 
and for older combatants to engage in contests of the same 
kind. Can any thing be more preposterous than to call this 
education? But, on the other hand, when the prizes are so 
great, can we wonder that there is a never-failing supply of 
combatants, — not from the best minds of the nation, who, 
intent on real knowledge, scorn to prostitute their talents to 
such base purposes ; but of second-rate and vulgar men, who 
are ready to travel any road that offers them a prospedl, how- 
ever distant, of a bishopric? 

The English classical system, therefore, is a prote6ted mo- 
nopoly of the strictest kind. The manufadlure of Greek and 
Latin verses is fostered by a system of bounties that are almost 
prohibitive of any other style or quality of teaching ; and they 
lead to the inevitable result of a system of high bounties and 
stridl protection, — the production of a surplus of very costly 
and very worthless goods, and the prevention of all improve- 
ment by the destrudlion of all competition. 

But, it will perhaps be asked, " If this is the condition of 
English education, whence come the real scholars and well- 
educated men that we know England possesses?" And cer- 
tainly, after the recent visit we have had from one distinguished 
English scholar,* we cannot doubt that even Oxford can pro- 
duce men eminent alike for learning and for large-hearted love 
of liberty. But I have to say in answer to the queiy, first, that 
I fear th'at such scholars are really much rarer in England than 
is commonly supposed ; and that the English aristocracy, as a 
body, are not well educated.! The evidence I have adduced is 

* Professor Goldwin Smith. 

t It is to be observed, that, even in classical learning itself, it is to 
Germany, and not to England, that we look for real additions to our 
knowledge. The best critical editions of the classics in use in England 
are mainly the work of German scholars. 

5* 



54 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

sufficient to pi'ove it; and, if by nothing else, it has been of late 
abundantly made evident by the events of the passing hour. 
Our English brethren, it is true, bear us no good-will. In their 
eagerness to monopolize the commerce of the world, they hate 
a nation which threatens to be their rival ; in their efforts to 
sustain the overgrown and now tottering power which they 
have built up through their conquests and their colonies, they 
are jealous of a nation which may at any time dispute their 
arrogant pretensions.* But I do not think that this is sufficient 
wholly to explain their base condu6t towards us in our late 
struggle to emancipate ourselves from the demon of slavery. 
Common prudence, if no higher motive, would have counselled 
a well-educated nation not to make such indecent haste to 
grant the rights of belligerents to a band of assassins and men- 
stealers, in comparison with whom all previous traitors are as 
angels of light. Ordinary wisdom, if not good feeling, should 
have prevented them from equipping and sending out, under 
the hypocritical cloak of a pretended neutrality, armed cruisers 
to prey upon the commei'ce of a friendly nation, if their educa- 
tion had taught them any thing of its real power. A small 
share of ordinary knowledge would have been enough to pre- 
vent them from indulging in the taunts and insults which have 
embittered against them for generations a kindred people who 
ought to be their friends. I can wholly account for their con- 
dudl only by their gross and stupid ignorance^ — an ignorance 
on the part of their ruling classes — for it is of their ruling 
classes that I here speak — such as perhaps nothing but an 
Eton training in longs and shorts can explain; an ignorance 
in branches of knowledge, with which no man who would do a 
man's work in the world can dispense, such as would disgrace 
an American schoolboy. One of their Reviews said, recently, 

* When I speak thus of the English people, I mean, of course, that 
portion — I fear a very large portion — whose sentiments are repre- 
sented by the "London Times." So long as that infamous paper shall 
have the power and enjoy the popularity it possesses, so long we must 
hold the English people responsible for its opinions. 



CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 55 

that there were not ten men in the House of Commons who 
were acquainted with the rudiments of the science of political 
economy ; and another has lately asserted, that there was not 
a minister in the British Cabinet who had the least knowledge 
of physical science. One more addition to these deficiencies 
could surely be made, — a general and very great deficiency 
in their knowledge of civil and political geography, as shown 
in their estimate of the true chara6ler of one at least of the 
leading nations of the world. 

But, in the next place, I think it is evident that a large 
number of the best scholars and most eminent men of England 
are — as I shall presently show — not the product of her pub- 
lic schools, but either self-educated or privately educated men ; 
to whom we must certainly add many who, by strength of 
genius, or by pursuing an independent course at school and 
College, have got a real education ; or who, by toughness of 
intelle6tual fibre, have sui-vived, perhaps not wholly un- 
harmed, the utmost injury that a bad system could inflid:. 
And, lastl}^, there are, both at the public schools, and still more 
at the Universities, conscientious and laborious tutors, men of 
admirable genius, who, by the excellence of their private 
teaching, protedt their pupils from the mischiefs which the 
system would otherwise occasion. It is such a man that 
Oxford has lately been endeavoring to starve for heresy, as 
she can no longer burn him.* 

But, in the ablest of her University men, can we not often 
detedl the defe6ts of her University training? What but Ox- 
ford narrowness could have produced such a Tory as Earl 
Derby? Is his translation of Homer an offset for his blind 
and bitter hatred of freedom? What but that makes even Mr. 
Gladstone f — if we may believe Englishmen themselves — 

* Professor Jowett. 

t Mr. Gladstone's whimsical argument in favor of classical studies 
is well criticized in the articles on the Public Schools Report in the 
"National Review" for November, and the "Edinburgh Review" for 
July, 1864. 



56 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

fall short of being a statesman and a real leader of the people ? 
— what but that habit of refining, of hair-splitting, -which leads 
him, after enunciating a great principle to-day, to retra(5l it or 
fritter away its force to-morrow, the fault and weakness of a 
narrow literary culture? Would a real statesman ever have 
called the rebellion of slave-holding assassins " the creation of 
a new nation " ? What power less potent than Oxford bigotry 
could have plunged one of the greatest of her sons in this gen- 
eration into the doleful abyss of worn-out Romish superstition? 
That is a sad page in biography that records the advice of his 
Oxford friends to the truly great and large-hearted Arnold, 
to swallow his doubts, and sign the thirty-nine articles ; and 
can we not trace the marks of the fetters it threw around his 
spirit for ever after? What takes away from our enjoyment 
of the genius of his son, but that narrowness, that priggish- 
ness, which seems inseparable from the mere belles lettres 
scholar? In such a training, there is, to use the words of 
the Camden Professor of History, " a want of solidity, of ac- 
quaintance with mankind, and so of pra6lical power, which 
makes the finished scholar often an inefficient and useless 
man." * 

And the results would seem to be beginning to alarm the 
English aristocracy themselves. The appointment of this Com- 
mission, and of the equally important University Commissions 
which preceded it, appears to have been one fruit of that 
alarm. While the lower classes, through the stimulus that 
has been given of late years to the efforts for their education 
by large appropriations of money, are steadily rising in the 
scale of intelligence, in spite of a clumsy bureaucracy and bitter 
sectarian quarrels ; while the great, adtive trading and manu- 
facturing middle-class are giving themselves a real education,! 

* Vol. ii. p. 14. 

t " During the last four years," says Rev. B. Price, Sedleian Profes- 
sor of Natural Philosophy at Oxford, " I have become acquainted, 
through the Oxford local examinations, with the standard of knowledge 
of mathematical subjects possessed by boys belonging to the middle- 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIEXTIFIC STUDIES. 57 

— the aristocracy, equipped with merely this ornamental sham, 
are steadily declining in power and influence. If you will turn 
to the i32d vol. of " Hansard's Debates," the volume for 
1854, you will find a remarkably able speech, by Mr. Hors- 
man, on this subjedt, delivered during the debate on the Report 
of the Oxford University Commission ; and in the volume 
for 1855 there is a report of the debate in the House of Lords 
on the same subjedl, in which the old Tory ex-chancellor. Lord 
Lyndhurst, who was surely an impartial witness, said, " I 
thmk that the Universities exert much less influence, and have 
a far weaker hold upon the public feeling of the country at the 
present day, than it was their good fortune to possess at a not 
very distant period. When I first entered public life, I found 
in the other House of Parliament that a majority of the mem- 
bers of tliat assembly had been educated at one or the other of 
the Universities. Now, however, as I understand, not more 
than one-sixth, or at most one-fifth, of the representatives of 
the people have been educated at either of those great institu- 
tions." * Mr. Heywood, in his book on Academical Reform, f 
referring to the destrudlion of mental vigor, occasioned by a 
false system of education, says, in regard to the legal profes- 
sion, "The old type of the academically distinguished judge is 
hardly to be found ; self-taught and energetic genius has 
invaded the field of legal promotion, and .the course of Univer- 
sity study has become too laborious and exhausting for young 
intelledls." And, in the " Social Science Transa6lions " for 
1859,1 ^^^ Rev. Foster Barham Zincke, a gentleman well 
known for his enlightened advocacy of popular education, 



class schools ; and I find it, for extent and accuracy, f^ superior to that 
which is exhibited by the candidates for matriculation from public 
schools who come under mj notice. These latter can, in many cases, 
scarcely apply the rules of arithmetic, and generally egregiouslj fail in 
questions which require a little independent thought and common 
sense," (Vol. ii. p. 24.) 

* Hansard's Debates, third series, vol. cxxxvii. p. 1715. 

t p. 181. X P- 287. 



58 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

himself an Oxford man, testifies as follows : " I live in the 
neighborhood of a strictly agricultural town, the capital of 
an agricultural county ; but of its population, now amount- 
ing to forty thousand souls, I am not aware that a single 
individual, except the clergy [to whom it is indispensable, as 
otherwise they cannot receive ordination], has received a Uni- 
versity education. Probably the educated classes of the enter- 
prising manufadluring town in which we are now assembled 
(Bi"adford) show the same pradtical disregard of our Univer- 
sities. It is to the requirements for holy orders, and the hopes 
of a fellowship, that the Universities now owe their very exist- 
ence. Every year the proportion of the members of the two 
Houses of Parliament, of the bar, and of the gentry, that have 
received a University education, decreases. The fa 61 is patent 
to all, that they have lost the hold they once had on the edu- 
cated classes." 

This view will be corroborated if we consider how many of 
the most influential minds of the century, in science, literature, 
art, and politics, have either had no connexion whatever with 
the Universities, or are under small obligation to them for any 
connexion they may have had. In politics and political econ- 
omy, we might name, among others, Romilly, Bentham, Ri- 
cardo. Bright, Cobden,* Stuart Mill. Though the Government 
of England is monopolized by the aristocracy, the political 
thought which governs her governors comes daily more and 
more from the people. The list of " uneducated " men of sci- 
ence — if I may be allowed the absurdity of such a phrase — is 
far longer, as, after what has been said, might reasonably be 
expected, than any the Universities can show, — Davy, WoUas- 
ton, Dalton, Faraday, Wheatstone, Delabeche, Murchison, 



* In a recently published notice of the lamented statesman whom 
England has just lost, Professor Goldwin Smith sajs, " Palmerston has 
held office almost all his life. Cobden never held an office of any kind ; 
yet the policy of Cobden is prevailing over the policy of Palmerston, as 
the day prevails over the night." 



CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 59 

Hind, South, Fitzroy, Playfair, Carpenter — it might be in- 
definitely extended ; and we shall find that the most eminent 
of her College-educated men of science are the foremost in 
denouncing her University system. Of course, all her great 
engineers, inventors, and builders are uneducated men, — 
Watt, Telford, Smeaton, Rennie, Brindley, the Brunels, the 
Stephensons, Sir Joseph Paxton : it is with these names that 
that sad but glorious volume, ," The Pursuit of Knowledge 
under Difficulties" is filled. Her great artists are all '' un- 
educated" men, — Flaxman and Gibson, Landseer, Turner, and 
Stanfield, Kemble and Macready, and all the rest. And, when 
we turn to literature itself, the greatest English historical work 
of this generation — a, work on classic history too — was writ- 
ten by an " uneducated " London banker. The greatest, I 
might almost say the only, English attempt at a philosophy of 
' history, a work which, with all its errors and paradoxes, — and 
I shall not deny that they ai^e many and great, — is still one 
which cannot be matched by any similar academic performance, 
was the work of the " uneducated" son of a London merchant. 
Her novelists, Dickens, Thackeray, Jerrold, Marryat, come 
from all quarters save the banks of the Cam and the Isis ; not 
to mention so many of that sex which is excluded altogether 
from their sacred borders. Bulwer is, indeed, a Cambridge 
man ; but I think Cambridge will be slow to put forward 
that pretentious charlatan as an example of the fruits of her 
classical training. Even of her poets, critics, and essay- 
ists, what a long list are among the wholly " uneducated," 
or must be classed among those who derived no benefit from 
their stay at a University, save that (undoubtedly great) one 
which comes from mere residence at a place of learning ! The 
names at once occur of Crabbe, Rogers, Lamb, Moore, Mont- 
gomery, Hunt, Giflibrd, Hazlitt, Hood. Who would hesitate 
to say where Scott's real education lay? Who has criticised 
the education of Oxford so wittily as Sydney Smith, or so 
grimly as Carlyle ? Wordsworth and Coleridge, in their short 
stay at the University, owed little or nothing to the studies 



60 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

of the place. Southey says he only learned to stuim there — 
badly ; Byron was ruined there ; and the beautiful genius of 
Shelley found there, instead of the help and guidance it so 
much needed, only cruel and ignominious abuse. Keats, some 
of whose exquisite poems breathe the very spirit of classical 
antiquity, was a stable-keeper's son, and never studied at public 
school or University. England's eminent surgeons and physi- 
cians are not University men ; and what is it that in that country 
keeps theology so far behind all other sciences, but the fadl that 
the clergy are the only profession who are compelled to subjedl 
their minds to the full "dementalizing" power of Oxford train- 
ing? What power less potent could produce the bigotry of 
an English High-Church bishop? 

I am not forgetful of the eminent names that may be pro- 
duced on the other side ; but, even in regard to these, the ques- 
tion must always be asked. How far was their eminence due * 
to their education? The real relation in which the English 
schools and Universities stand to her greatest minds, even in 
the past, and the share which University teaching really had 
in training them, is a problem that still needs elucidation. 
" We are not sure," says the present Lord Brougham, writing 
in 1826, "whether the result of the investigation would be so 
favorable as is commonly supposed to Oxford and Cambridge. 
And of this we are sure, that many persons, who, since they 
have risen to eminence, are perpetually cited as proofs of the 
beneficial tendency of English education, were at College never 
mentioned but as idle', frivolous men, fond of desultory reading, 
and negligent of the studies of the place. It would be indeli- 
cate to name the living ; but we may venture to speak more 
particularly of the dead. It is truly curious to observe the use 
that is made, in such discussions, of names which we acknowl- 
edge to be glorious, but in which the Colleges have no reason 
to glory, — that of Bacon, who reprobated their fundamental 
constitution ; of Dryden, who abjured his Alma Mater, and 
regretted that he had passed his youth under her care ; of 
Locke, who was censured and expelled ; of Milton, whose per- 



CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 61 

son was outraged at one University, and whose works were 
committed to the flames at the other." * 

It may perhaps be argued, that many of the " uneducated " 
men whom I have been enumerating would have been the 
better for a University training. For a true University train- 
ing, no doubt they would, — one that would have developed 
all their powers harmoniously, while it gave full play to their 
special genius. With the advocates of such a training, I have 
here no controversy : I will even grant that many of these wri- 
ters, in spite of their genius, betray the faults which are wont to 
mark the self-educated man. But would it have been better for 
Mr. Buckle himself, if, by a long course of nonsense-verses, the 
attempt had been made to flatten and polish him down to the 
regulation standard of Oxford mediocrity? Mr. Buckle at least 
stimulates us to think : can as much be said of Oxford bishops? 
There is a passage in a recently published book of travels 
in Russia, by Professor Piazzi Smyth, the Astronomer-Royal 
for Scotland, which bears on this question, and records a some- 
what surprising conclusion. Describing a conversation he 
had with that eminent astronomer, Struve, as to the results of 
their experience in University teaching, both agreed that on 
many points further inquiry was greatly needed ; but Pi'ofessor 
Struve said, that " this conclusion had been drawn indepen- 
dently by so many differently circumstanced men in the Russian 
and German-Baltic provinces, from the general impressions 
which their recolledlions gave them, that there could be little 
doubt of its containing much truth, — truth, too, of a startling 

* " Edinburgh Review," vol. xliii. p. 339. To this might be added the 
bitter words of Gibbon, in his Autobiography: "To the University of 
Oxford I acknowledge no obligation ; and she will as cheerfully renounce 
me for a son as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent four- 
teen months at Magdalen College : they proved the fourteen months the 
most idle and unprofitable of my whole life," — et seq. Eton was hardly 
better in his day than in ours. "A finished scholar may emerge from 
the head of Westminster or Eton in total ignorance of the business and 
conversation of English gentlemen in the latter end of the eighteenth 
century." 

6 



62 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

chara6ler : t/ie first boys at schools disappear at the Colleges., 
and those %uho are first in the Colleges disappear in the 
ivorld.'^ * I am not sure that a similar conclusion would not 
follow from a similar investigation into our own, as well as into 
English and German academical history ; and that it would 
not be found, that the men most useful and successful in after- 
life were not those who had placed themselves most fully under 
the influence of College training, or been stimulated to exer- 
tion by meie hope of College rewards, but those who had 
been most successful in escaping its narrowing influences, 
while, on the other hand, they had also escaped the still greater 
dangers of idleness and dissipation in the formative period of 
their history, — men who had cast from them the trammels of 
pedantry, and with independent energy marked out their own 
career. There is a sensible piece of evidence given to our 
Commissioners by a gentleman who appeared as the father of 
Eton boys, Mr. Walter, M.P. for Berks. He says : — 

"I should not want one of mjown sons to get the Newcastle scholar- 
ship (the chief prize at Eton), judging from what I have known, from 
my own observation, of the after-career of men of my own time who 
obtained it. ... I think the great objedl of a public school is to train 
the greatest amount of average talent which is likely to be useful in 
English society. You want a strong, healthy race of men, both in mind 
and body, and not a number of finely grown plants, — not boys, like 
three-year-old winners of the Derby, — horses who win one race, and 
then are done for." (Vol. iii. p. 301.) 

The useless and unpradlical character of English academi- 
cal education is pointedly illustrated by the evidence of Mr. 
Chadwick, the eminent social economist, so widely and honor- 
ably known in connection with the English Poor Law and 
Sanitary Commissions. It was given before another Parlia- 
mentary Education Committee, — that appointed to consider 
the subjedl of competitive examinations in connection with the 
re-organization of the civil sei-vice. These competitive exami- 

* Three Cities in Russia, p. 85. 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 63 

nations may be called the latest English " craze " on the subje6l 
of Education. Mr. Chadwick thus comments on them, and it 
shows very strikingly how much the life has gone out of Eng- 
lish academical education : — 

"An examination (of candidates for posts in the civil service), 
mainly on an academical basis, would have excluded from the public 
service more than one Lord Chancellor and Chief Justice, who began 
life as young clerks in attorneys' offices. The late Duke of Wellington 
declared that an academical examination would have excluded him from 
the army.* It would have excluded Nelson from the navy. . . . My 
objeAions have reference, not solely to the time spent in obtaining pro- 
ficiency in the classics, but also and most to the present mode of treating 
what are called the pure sciences (the purity of which is at the expense 
of pracfticality), and to giving prizes for eminence in the habit of reason- 
ing front abstradlions, which commonly only conclude io abstractions. 
I would note, as examples of what I mean, eminence in pure geometry, 
which leaves the landowner incapable of measuring his own lands, or of 
testing their measurement by others ; pure and hypothetical hj'draulics, 
which give him no help in draining his fields, and which, being full of 
false or inapplicable formuljB, lead, as we have pradlically found, to great 
waste and failures ; abstract pnevnnatics, which give no help for the 
ventilation of buildings he construes, or the house he inhabits, and 
which, with abstrad: acoustics, leave both houses of Parliament in a 
state of helpless annoyance ; finally, mechanics, abstract from the know- 
ledge and consideration of the density of substances, strength of mate- 
rials, and fricflion, which leave the accomplished theoretical engineers of 
the French Colleges, and, indeed, our own military engineers, educated 
in like manner, to be surpassed by the rude pradticality of the most emi- 
nent English engineers, whose education began at the wheelbarrow or 
the workbench. To refer to instances of the praftical errors occasioned 
by the past methods of training in merely abstract reasoning, which are 
matters of notoriety, the late Superintendent of Machinery at the Wool- 
wich Dockyard was eminent as a calculator; and, being one of the three 
judges appointed to determine a question between locomotive and station- 
ary engines, for the first railway at Liverpool, he declared, — reasoning 
upon the habit of abstract mathematics, without reference to the real 



* "The great Duke was at Eton a few years afterwards, — a shy, 
retiring boy, who left the school before he had ever risen into the Fifth 
Form, and in whom neither masters nor schoolfellows seem to have de- 
te(5led the germ of future greatness." Q^ EioTtiana" in Blacktvood''s 
Magazine, Marck, 1865.) His older brother. Marquis Wellesley, was a 
famous writer of Latin verses. 



64 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

nature of fridlion, — that, if a locomotive were produced which dragged 
without cogs, he would undertake to eat the rails and the whole engine. 
A striftly academical examination would have admitted him, and would 
most certainly have excluded those who did the work. It would have 
admitted the gentleman who was, ^ar excelletice, an instructor in the 
abstradt sciences, and who wrote articles in the Reviews to show the im- 
practicability of steam navigation across the Atlantic; and it would 
have excluded those who accomplished the feat. It would have admitted 
those who condemned the screw-propeller ' as being contrary to the ab- 
stradt law, that action and re-a<5tion are equal and contrary;' and it 
would have excluded those who effeded the improvement. It would 
have included such men as the Astronomer-Royal, who brought before 
the Institution of Civil Engineers an abstradl calculation to prove 
that the Crystal Palace could not stand; and it would have excluded 
the gentleman who designed it, and who made it stand, as he had 
made other buildings stand, and who opened the way to some of the 
largest strudlural improvements that have been made in our time. 
Other instances may be cited as more direftly applicable to adminis- 
tration. As, for instance, in relation to finance, it would have included 
the ' calculating-boy,' and would have excluded a great proportion of 
the most eminent actuaries, merchants, and Direcftors of the Bank of 
England, the East India Company, and other great commercial bodies. 

"The present academical education, and the examination attached to 
it, would, in respeft to some branches of administration, give the pref- 
erence to those geometric and abstraft reasoners, who, from narrow 
premises on the ratio of increase of population to that of production, 
inferred a state of destitution and crime, as arising from unavoidable 
necessity, and therefore as unpreventable, and irremediable by any leg- 
islation or administration ; who inferred from abstract data a continued 
downward tendency in the face of all the faCts of increasing prosperity, 
and who excited the benevolent to exertions in order to get the country 
out of an abyss which it was not in, or near getting into. It would have 
given precedence for the Poor-Law service to a gentleman who could 
tell me the names of ACtieon's hounds, but who could not tell me the 
names of the chief statutes to be dealt with, and whose education had 
grounded him neither in the old principles of public policy, nor in law 
or political economy applicable to them ; and it would have excluded a 
candidate who was pre-eminent in the practical administrative reform, 
though he had never taken an academical degree. It would have given 
the preference to those doCtors in medicine who have instituted, and 
against experience have defended, quarantines, over those who have at 
once proved the uselessness and evils of such measures of precaution, 
and the efficiency of others. 

" Numerous examples might, I apprehend, be adduced to prove, that, 
for a safe basis even of general examinations, it would be necessary to 
look to a greatly reformed University examination, or to the proposed 



CLASSICAL AXn SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. bO 

new school of praAical science and art, in which professional adminis- 
tration, public as well as private, might hereafter be included." * 

I need not apologize for the length, at which I have quoted 
Mr. Chadwick. It is the evidence of an able, pradlical man, 
and one of England's greatest benefactors. It does not prove 
the uselessness of theoretic knowledge, much less an)^ antagon- 
ism between true theory and practice : but it exhibits in a 
striking light the worthlessness of much that passes for higher 
intellectual training, when put to the test of actual use, and 
the danger in education of divorcing theory from praClice ; 
and is thus a testimony to the soundness of the principle upon 
which such enterprises as yours are based. 

For, gentlemen, if you were to build a mill, and use in its 
construction all the means and appliances of art, sparing no 
expense to make it perfeCt in construction and machinery ; if 
you should then put into it workmen and managei's trained 
expressly to run your machinery ; and then, after all had been 
done for it that wealth and skill could do, you should find, 
upon setting it in operation, that it worked badly, and that its 
product, amidst a vast mass of almost worthless material, 
showed only here and there a perfeCt article, and that one an 
article rather fitted for show than use, — you would surely sus- 
peCt some error in the frinciple on which the mill and 
machinery were constructed. It is perfeCt of its kind ; no 
expense has been spared ; it has managers who perfeClly 
understand its machinery, — and yet the produCt is worthless. 
Clearly there must be some error, not of detail, but of principle, 
to account for it. Now, this seems to me to be the condition 
of the great English schools. They have been tried so long, so 
much pains and cost have been* lavished on them, that their 
failure cannot be accounted for except upon the theory of 



* " Parliamentary Report on Civil-Service Examinations." I am in- 
debted for my knowledge of this Report to the admirably indexed and 
almost complete collecftion of modern British Parliamentary documents, 
to be found in that noble Institution, the Free City Library of Boston. 
6* 



66 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

some fundamental error in their organization. And I think 
this supposition is abundantly corroborated by the evidence 
which I shall now proceed to mention. 

Among the witnesses summoned before them, the Com- 
mission ■ adopted the excellent plan of inviting some of the 
most eminent English men of science to give their views 
on the general subjedl of public-school education ; and this 
evidence forms the most valuable and interesting part of the 
Report. When I mention the names of Lyell, Faraday, 
the younger Hooker, Owen, Herschel, Max Miiller, W. B. 
Carpenter, and Dr. Acland, as among these witnesses, it will 
be seen what a value this part of the evidence must possess. 
It, almost without exception, goes to corroborate the view I 
have been taking, that the crying evilg in English higher 
education, and the sources of its failure, are two, though very 
closely conne6led : first, that it utterly negledls the principle, 
patent to all who will give the least attention to the study of 
the human mind, that men are born into the world with the 
most diverse mental aptitudes, requiring, instead of one, a great 
variety of means for their development, — of means capable of 
combining, and requiring to be combined in varying ways and 
proportions, to suit the varying circumstances ; and that, there- 
fore, it is simply preposterous to attempt to run all minds in 
one mould, to fit all to the Procrustes-bed of one narrow 
system : and, secondly, that the system itself with which the 
experiment is ti-ied is antiquated and obsolete, in that it utterly 
ignores the great body of modern physical science, which has 
come into existence since it was established in the days of 
Laud and William of Wykeham. So far from considering 
science worthless as an instrument of mental training, fit only 
to subserve the plebeian and utilitarian purposes of life, which 
is the charadleristic view taken by the aristocracy who sustain 
these schools, — a view worthy of an aristocracy which sides 
with slaveholding assassins in a war waged for republican 
freedom, — these men of science, — and, gentlemen, they are 
the true aristocracy of England ^- trace that weakness of 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIENTIFIC STUBIES. 67 

judgment, that want of all reasoning power, which has been 
betrayed by the liability of these very educated classes to be 
humbugged by every new charlatanry, such as table-tipping 
and spirit-rapping and crystal-globe astrologers,* — to the total 
absence of that mental training which only the inductive 
philosophy can give. You may be sure that they do not look 
at science from any such gross pocket-filling point of view ; 
but while unanimously recognizing the claims of language 
as a fadtor in education, and doing full justice to the value 
of the classical languages in particular, they claim its i"ightful 
position for science as an equally indispensable element. 
In fa<5l, the only truly wide and generous views of what 
really constitutes a liberal education are to be found in the 
evidence of these men of science, and, to their honor be it 
said, in that of one or two of the masters of Rugby, A part 
of this evidence I proceed now to lay before you. I shall 
sele6l the portions that bear more directly upon the following 
points : isi, As to the diversity of mental charadteristics, and 
the need of variety in methods of teaching and courses of 
insti'udtion ; zd, As to the importance of physical science in 
education, and the practical eftedt of its omission from the 
higher English education ; T,d, As to the age at which the 
teaching of science should be begun, and its true place in 
the curriculum of liberal study : and I shall call, as my 
chief witnesses. Professor Faraday, Professor Owen, Professor 
Carpenter, Dr. Hooker, Sir Charles Lyell, Sir John Herschel, 
together with the Commissioners themselves, and the few 
masters in these great schools who are sufficiently free from 
prejudice to do justice to the subjed.f 



* See an article on " Zadkielism," in the "London Reader" for July 
4, 1863 ; and compare Professor Faraday in the volume of Lecftures on 
Education, delivered before the Royal Institution in 1854. 

t My extracts from this evidence have extended to such a length, 
that I have removed them to the Appendix, p. 81, where I ask for them 
the reader's careful attention, as by far the most valuable part of this 
pamphlet. 



68 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

Nothing could well seem more conclusive than this evidence ; 
coming, as it does, from the men of the highest scientific emi- 
nence in England. Yet we find the least possible sympathy 
with such views among the masters of the schools. Certainly 
they are not all like the Head-masters of Eton and Winchester, 
whose extraordinary testimony I quoted at the beginning of this 
discourse ; but even the most enlightened of them, the Rev. Dr. 
Temple, of Rugby, whose communication to the Commission- 
ers, in an able and interesting paper, and who was examined 
by them at great length, seems to have an exceedingly inad- 
equate idea of the value of scientific study, if we measure it 
'by such evidence as that I have just been quoting, or of the 
place it is likely to occupy in modern education. The most 
interesting evidence on this subject, from the public schools, 
comes from one of his subordinates, the Rev. Charles Evans. 
In a communication to the Commissioners, in reply to their 
schedule of printed questions, he writes — and let it be remem- 
bered that we have here the result of an extended experience 
at one of these schools — as follows : — 



" It must be remembered, that a large number of boys leave Rugby 
every year from lovi^er forms ; and to most of them, I think, our system 
does but scant justice. I am not speaking of the idle or the dull, but of 
a very large class of boys of good natural abilities and industry, who 
yet do not reach high positions in the school. At about sixteen years 
of age, this type of mind appears to reach the length of its classical 
tether; and, however much worked after that time, it takes no polish. 
Such boys are constantly passed, in the race for promotion, by j^ounger 
and more apt competitors ; and leave school, at seventeen or eighteen 
years of age, very imperfedlly educated, with little Latin and less Greek ; 
with stagnant and ill-informed minds, if not a great disrelish for study 
and application of all kinds. They have never reached the point at which 
the study of classics begins to acquire its greatest value as an engine 
of mental discipline ; and, apart from the moral and social advantages 
and the unconscious self-education of a large school, their last two or 
three years at Rugby are, I think, almost unprofitable. It is quite true, 
that, in many instances, such boys grow into eminent men; and we are 
tempted to confound J>osi hoc with propter hoc, forgetting how much 
maybe due to natural force of character and abilities, developed in spits 
of, rather than in consequence of, their early intellectual training. 



CLASSICAL AXB SCIEXTIFIC STUDIES. 69 

" To boys of this class, I am strongly of opinion that some modifi- 
cation of our present system would be most valuable. Up to the age of 
fifteen, upon the average, the staple of instru6lion ought, I think, to be 
grammar, taught through the study of the dead languages. Having 
acquired a solid groundwork in Latin and Greek, they might then be 
permitted to drop a certain portion of their classical work (say versifi- 
cation and Greek), and devote the time thus gained to mathematics 
principally, — to physical science, history, and modern language; care 
being taken, of course, to guard against superficial smattering. It does 
so happen that some such training as this would better meet the imme- 
diate wants of several professions and departments in practical life ; but 
I advocate it, not on this narrow ground, but in the abstradl, as a valu- 
able liberal education." (Vol. ii. p. 314.) 

Mr. Evans feels it incumbent on him to apologize for 
the accident, that his suggestion is practically valuable ; and 
his plan seems to me to bear the marks of the classical pre- 
judices in which he has been trained. For w^hy should such 
boys' minds be v^^earied and schoolmasters be worn out with 
teaching the rudiments of Greek, when, by his own showing, 
such teaching will never be put to its highest use? Why 
cannot modern languages, if properly taught, take the place of 
Greek, even as a part of the " solid groundwork"?* while they 
would have the added merit — which, perhaps, is no merit in 
his view — of being practically useful. And in postponing the 
teaching of science to so late a period, and in attaching so 
much more weight to the abstradl study of mathematics than 
to the study of science and history, ]Mr. Evan's shows that 
he has paid but little attention to the true order of develop- 
ment of the youthful faculties. It seems to me that no reform 
will fully meet the case, that shall stop short of establishing a 
course of liberal education, in which linsfuistic studies shall be 



* On the educational value of modern languages, when properly 
taught, see some good i-emarks in the " National Review" for November, 
1864, p. 296; and a valuable article on the School Claims of Languages, 
in the " Westminster Review" for Odlober, 1853, by Dr. Hodgson. See 
also the second series of Professor Max Miiller's Ledlures on Language. 
The study of modern languages, considered as a training of the mind, 
has fallen into undeserved negledl, from the empirical and unsatisfac- 
tory manner in which they are usually taught. 



70 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

represented, first, by a study of the Latin language and liter- 
ature, more thorough and eftedlive than it usually is now, inas- 
much as it should be treated as the foundation of a future 
study of language and general grammar, and of a thorough 
knowledge of the modern languages of the same family ; but in 
which the study of Greek shall be wJiolIy superseded by a real 
study of the mother-tongue and these modern languages ; and 
in which the study of physical science, begun from the earliest 
moment that the child's observing powers begin to be adlive, 
shall be continued in such a thorough manner as shall develop 
the full disciplinary power it possesses. His pidture of the 
class of young men who derive no benefit from the Rugby 
system is fully applicable to very large numbers of young men 
at our own Colleges and high schools ; and I do not think our 
Colleges will gain that full measure of confidence they ought 
to possess in the public mind, till some such course as this, 
begun at school., aitd accepted for admissioit to them., shall 
be placed upon the same level, in respedl to rank and honors, 
as the exclusively classical course of preparation through 
which they now insist that all boys' minds shall be driven.* 

Experiments have been begun, and are already carried far 
enough in England, to show that such a course would be 
successful. The aristocratic spirit of the old institutions we 
have been examining is so intense, and their course of study so 
utterly at variance with the wants of modern life, that, except- 
ing by a ffew pupils who enter on the foundation, they are not 
frequented by the children of the great English " middle class," 
with whom the future destinies of the nation are likely to rest. 
To supply the want of a higher education for them, there 
have already been established certain large collegiate schools, 

* In the case of most, if not all of our American Colleges, while a 
greater number of Latin and Greek books must be read for admission 
than are required at a matriculation examination at Oxford or Cam- 
bridge, the young men may, and usually do enter, entirely ignorant of 
the elementary principles of physics or of any branch of natural 
history. 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 71 

where the experimerlt of a modern eckication is a6lually 
undergoing trial. Such are Marlborough, Wellington, and 
Cheltenham Colleges, brief accounts of which are given in 
the Appendix to the Commissioners' Report ; in all which a 
"modern school" has been established along-side of, and 
entirely on an equality with, the classical department, though 
of course working under great disadvantages, in consequence of 
the controlling influence of classical tradition and that system 
of bounties placed upon classical knowledge to which I have 
already adverted. But, in spite of all discouragements, the 
. scheme seems likely to prove entirely successful. The fol- 
lowing extracts are taken from the communications of the 
Rev. G. G. Bradley, Head-master, and the Rev. J. F. Bright, 
Master, of the Modern School at Marlborough. Mr. Bradley 
writes : — 

"The obje(5l of the modern school is twofold : 15^, To prepare boys 
for definite examinations, in which they would not succeed if they com- 
peted diredl from the classical school ; 2(i, To attempt to solve, in some 
degree, the question often asked, How far is it possible to give a really 
good public-school education on any other basis than that of instrudlion 
in dead languages? 

"With regard to the first of these two objedls, there can be no 
doubt as to the result; six candidates from our Modern School have com- 
peted at Woolwich the present year. All but one were successful at 
their first attempt; and scarcely one of them could have succeeded, had 
thej remained in the classical department. 

"I imagine, however, that it is the other question which will appear 
of more importance in the eyes of Her Majesty's Commissioners. 

"I do not not believe that we are in a position at present to answer 
the question finally and decidedly ; for the experiment has not yet been 
fairly tried : but I may state briefly my own opinion. While I should 
deliberately prefer, as the best education, that mixture of the careful 
study of the language and substance of the great writers of antiquity 
with modern reading and mathematics, which I attempt to combine in 
my own teaching, yet I believe that a thoroughly sound education may 
be given, and at the same time the advantages of public-school life 
enjoyed by boys, with whom, for various reasons, a diiferent plan is 
pursued, a larger space devoted to mathematics and science, and a 
thorough study of German and French substituted for classics. But 
the difficulties of working out this experiment are great." (Vol. ii. 
P- 511O 



72 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

Mr. Bradley enumerates, as the chief among these difficul- 
ties, the impossibility of finding a sufficient number of teach- 
ers as skilful in teaching modern branches, as, through long 
training, the best classical masters have become in teaching the 
ancient languages, and the necessity of employing foreigners to 
teach the modern languages. To this might be added the 
almost total want of good elementary text-books in science. 
His conclusion, however, is as follows : " In spite of all 
the difficulties with which we have had to contend, and of 
some which we are by degrees overcoming, I am entirely con- 
vinced that the general result is most valuable, — so valuable 
that I should deeply deplore the abandonment, from any cause, 
of the experiment." And Mr. Bright, the Master of the 
Modern School, writes as follows : — 

"At its first foundation, it was thronged, as might be expedled, with 
boys who desired to avoid the stricter mental training of the classical 
school, — with the idle, and, in a great degree, bj both the rough and 
unpolished portion of the school ; and for a time'it acquired a distinct 
and bj no means enviable character. Already, however, in the few 
years during which it has existed, this has been entirely obliterated. 
The forms are as well organized, the teaching is as regular, and the 
amount of work done probably as great, as in the classical school. Con- 
sequently all marks of difference have disappeared, and the line of 
demarcation between the two departments is scarcely more pronounced 
than between any two forms in ordinary circumstances. 

" Meanwhile proofs of the usefulness of the institution are constant- 
ly given. Scarcely a half-year passes, but several boys whose intellec'^s 
were stifled in the uncongenial atmosphere of the classics, and who were 
consequently rapidly sinking into a state of hopeless or reckless dunce- 
dom, pass from the Upper to the Modern School ; and, finding there room 
for their peculiar talents, regain their self-esteem, again set cheerfully to 
work, and gain, with their improved character, a good and sensible edu- 
cation, if not so perfedt a one as the classical system offers (i'). Nay, 
more, they not unfrequently attain high positions in the school. For 
the last two years, the chief mathematical prize has been carried oflf by 
Modern-School boys, neither of whom could possibly have succeeded in 
the classical school; one of whom, indeed, had been tried, and found 
utterly wanting in that department. . . . 

"Whatever success has been reached has been obtained in the face 
of difficulties above enumerated, and is sufficient to give good ground to 
hope, that were those difficulties wholly, or in part, removed ; were there 



CLASSICLiL AXD SCIEXTIFIC STUDIES. 73 

the same appliances for Vnodern as for classical teaching; the same well- 
annotated books ; the same carefully arranged grammars ; the same 
accepted curriculum of classical authors, — an education might be given 
in modern, as accurate as in ancient subjeAs ; while in comprehensive- 
ness, in so far as it would be concerned with the wider field of modern 
thought, it might even have the advantage." (Vol. ii. p. 513.) 

Mr. Barry, Principal of Cheltenham College, says : — 

" In the competitive examinations for Woolwich and Sandhurst, the 
Modern Department has achieved decided and unusual success ; and its 
pupils have afterwards continued to attain distincftions at Woolwich,* 
Sandhurst,! and Addiscombe.| These are its only external tests : per- 
haps a more valuable one still may be deduced from the fad: of its con- 
tinued numbers and popularity, and from its having attained a complete 
equality in rank with the Classical Department. ... I think that its 
existence gives far greater perfedlion to the system of education, and 
far better scope for the various ability and knowledge of our boys, than 
could be possible if only the classical system prevailed. I feel sure that 
it gives a true education, and not mere instrucSlion on various subjedls." 
(Vol. ii. p. 548.) 

To this may be added the following extrail from the com- 
munication of the Rev. Dr. Mortimer, Head-master of the 
City of London School, another great " middle-class " institu- 
tion, which, opened for the first time in 1837, ^'^^ numbers 
six hundred and twenty-six boys : — 

"It is my opinion, founded on very considerable experience, that 
the limited time given to classics, in comparison with other public 
schools, is fully made up by the increased mental power obtained by an 
acquaintance with many other subje<5ts. At all events, it is a fadl, that 
the University career of pupils of the City of London School is emi- 
nently successful ; and the reason seems to be, that, from being early 
trained to take up several different subjedls of study, they acquire the 
faculty of readily adapting themselves to the work set before them, and 
bring to it a large amount of collateral information." (Vol. ii. p. 580.) 

With these extradls I shall close my long quotations from 
the Report. The question will be asked, What are the conclu- 
sions and recommendations of the Commission, which were 



* Royal Military Academy for Artillery and Engineers, 
t Royal Military College for Infantry and Cavalry. 
X East India Company's Military School. 



74 CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 

the result of this laborious and careful investigation ? I do not 
think it is too much to say, that the main conclusion is little 
more than a feeble compromise. Judged of from this dis- 
tance, it seems to leave almost untouched the chief objedion- 
able featui-es of the system, and simply recommends a supple- 
menting of it by greater efficiency in other departments. How 
far such recommendations are likely to be carried out by the 
present heads of the schools, one can judge from the specimens 
of their views which I have given. Great changes, however, 
in the constitution of the governing bodies of the institutions 
are recommended, of the practical efiedl of which it is difficult 
or impossible for a stranger to judge ; and, though the gross 
abuse of funds is dealt with with great tenderness, it is evident 
that it is not to be allowed to continue. That the conclusions 
of the Commission have been received with some disappoint- 
ment, seems to me evident from the tone of the British press ; 
though, of course, the Tories and the "Qiiarterly Review" find 
every thing as it should be. It is perhaps fortunate for the ulti- 
mate success of measures of reform, that more pressing political 
questions have engrossed the attention of Parliament ; and the 
discussion seems likely to be postponed till a more liberal and 
progressive set of rulers shall hold the reins of the English 
Government. 

I have thus brought to a conclusion, gentlemen of the 
Society, this long discussion, — a longer one than I had any 
idea of entering upon when I began. But I have not feared 
to trespass on your patience by the multitude of my details, or 
the length of my extradls ; for I trusted that you would think, 
as I do, that no more important subjedl can come up for our 
consideration. I do not hesitate to say, that the final success of 
our republican institutions will depend, moi^e than upon all 
else, upon the success of our republican education ; that the 
triumphant evidence we have just been giving of the strength 
and stability of these institutions is an evidence, more than of 
all else, of our success, even to the imperfect extent to which it 
has yet been carried, in educating the people. And when war 



CLASSICAL AND SCIEXTIFIC STUDIES. 7o 

shall have wholly ceased its alarms, and that vile spirit of caste 
which began with thanking God that there were no schools in 
its dominions,* and has ended its foul career in- rebellion, trea- 
son, and assassination, shall have returned to the pit of dark- 
ness from which it rose, no more momentous question will 
come before our now wholly free Republic than the question of 
the extension of the blessings of our education-system over 
the whole country, and the making it in all respe6ls what it 
should be to meet the wants of a free, self-governing people. 
That that system has been steadily improving during the 
twenty and more years over which my own observation 
and experience have extended cannot admit of doubt ; but that 
we have still many lessons to learn before it will approach per- 
fedlion is a conviclion which I believe I share with many who 
have given thought to the subject. It would be impossible to 
enter here upon the consideration of the application of the 
lessons that may be derived from English experience. I must 
conclude by expressing my convidlion, that in your new insti- 
tution the community will have a school that will be fully pre- 
pared to do its share in a real training of the mind of the 
coming generations. 



* "I thank God, there are no free schools and no printing; and I 
hope we shall not have these hundred years," were the words of Berkely, 
the royal Governor of Virginia in 1671. The present condition of that 
State is a striking commentary on the sentiment. 



APPENDIX. 



APPENDIX. 



I. — Page 13. 

The College * of Eton was founded in 1441 by Henry VI. It 
was intended originally to consist of a Provost and seventy 
poor-scholars, ten Fellows, ten chaplains, ten clerks, sixteen 
choristers, one head-master, one lower-master, and thirteen 
"poor, feeble men." The Provost is the head of the College, 
and is usually a retired head-master : he takes no part in the 
instrudion. The Fellows are thus defined by one of the pres- 
ent masters, " retired teachers, who have nothing to do with the 
school beyond preaching a few sermons to a congregation with 
which they are slightly acquainted ; and who only reside occa- 
sionally, yet take up a part of the limited space, within the 
College precin<5t, and, in addition to an ecclesiastical benefice, 
draw each one from the College a sum in the shape of divi- 
dends which might support ten or twelve exhibitioners." By 
one of the monstrous abuses universal in connection with 
English charities, the whole of the additional income derived 
from the vastly increased value of the school property goes, not 
to the school, but into the pockets of the entirely useless Pro- 
vost and Fellows. Thus the annual remuneration of each of 
the ten Fellows, for doing absolutely nothing, amounts to over 
four thousand dollars, in addition to an ecclesiastical benefice. 



* It should be remembered that the term " College," between which 
and University, in this country, no very definite line of distindlion is 
drawn, was not originally confined to institutions of learning; but, like 
its original. Collegium, was the title of corporations established for 
very diverse purposes. In this case the " College" of Eton is seen to 
have the character partly of a cathedral, partly of a school, and partly 
of a hospital. 



80 APPENDIX. 

The net income of the Pi'ovost is returned as tvventy-two 
thousand eight hundred and sixty dollars per annum ; and it 
depends entirely upon his own liberality or sense of justice 
how much or how little of this he shall devote to the legitimate 
uses of the College. The Commissioners very mildly report 
this as a state of things which ought not to continue. What 
result their suggestions will have, remains to be seen. Lord 
Brougham attempted a reform nearly fifty years ago, with 
small success.* 

The seventy foundation-scholars or " Collegers," who, among 
all the eight hundred boys now at Eton, appear to be the only 
ones who do any serious work, were to be, according to the 
statutes, " poor and needy, of good charadler, studiously 
inclined, and of honest conversation, able to read and sing, and 
grounded in the elements of grammar ; " and their support and 
education was to be wholly gratuitous. At present, though 
no money is paid for board or lodging, fees are exaded 
from them, and they do not come from the class whom the 
foundation was intended to benefit. The fees exadled, how- 
ever, are less (about one hundred dollars per annum) ; and 
there is a broad line of social distindlion between them and the 
"oppidans" or boarders, from whom they are distinguished 
by a peculiar dress. They seem really to study, and furnish 
nearly, if not quite, all the good scholars who go from the 
school. The sixteen choristers, who sei^ve also in the Chapel 
of Windsor Castle, are educated at a separate school in Wind- 
sor ; and the thirteen " feeble men " are now represented by 
ten almswomen. 

The income of the head-master is returned as $22,455, 
nearly equal to the salary of the President of the United 
States. It is exceeded, however, by that of the Head-master 
of Harrow, which is $31,440. The 7tet incomes of the Sub- 



* See Reports of the Selecfl Committee on the Education of the Lower 
Orders, 1S18. It was on this occasion, when Dr. Goodall, the Provost, 
was pleading "usage" for the monstrous and dishonest abuses, that 
Brougham was heard to mutter, "Usage, indeed! we shall next hear of 
highwaymen pleading the usage of Hounslow Heath." See an interest- 
ing account in the " Edinburgh Review," April, 1S61. 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 81 

masters of Eton, who keep boarding-houses, vary from $3,500 
to $S,ooo. 

The annual income from the Eton property is enormous,* 
and the school has landed estates (a complete list of which is 
given) in twenty-two of the forty-five counties of England. 
It has also wholly or partially in its gift forty-seven ecclesiasti- 
cal benefices, of the annual value of about $73,325. These are 
chiefly monopolized by the Provost and Fellows. 

Winchester and Westminster are, like Eton, Collegiate 
foundations. The former was founded by the famous William 
of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, in 13S7, and is under the 
government of a Warden and ten Fellows. Besides these, 
there were originally seventy scholars, a head-master and 
under-master, three chaplains, three clerks or " singing-men," 
and sixteen choristers. The constitution has been somewhat 
changed, and there are now one hundred foundation-boys and 
twenty " exhibitioners." The foundation-scholars here form a 
majority, and not, as at Eton, a small minority. The instruc- 
tion is not wholly gratuitous ; but the Warden estimates the 
advantage at about fifty pounds per annum. The income of 
tlie College, in the )'ear i860, amounted to $88, no. The 
income of the head-master, from his fees and boarding-house, 
was $15,000. The average necessary annual expenses of a 
" Commoner" are set down at $580. There were in 1S60 one 
hundred and ninety-seven boys. 

Westminster School was founded in the year 1560 by 
Queen Elizabeth. It is not a separate foundation, but is con- 
trolled by the Dean and Chapter of Westminster. It is situated 
in the city of London, contained in i860 one hundred and 
thirty -six boys, forty of them foundation-scholars; the re- 
mainder, in part boarders, and in part day-scholars. 

The Charterhouse is not a separate foundation, but is simply 
a school connected with, and supported from the vast funds of, 
the celebrated Charterhouse Hospital, founded in London in 
161 1 by Thomas Sutton. In i860 it contained one hundred 



* No estimate is given in the Report; but the " Edinburgh Review " 
reckons the total annual income at one hundred thousand dollars, very 
little of w^hich reaches the scholars for whom it was intended. 



82 AFPENDIX. 

and sixteen boys. The average annual income of the Hospital 
for the past seven years is returned as $113,735. 

Merchant Taylors' — another London school — w^as founded 
in 1 561 by the Merchant Taylors' Company, who expend upon 
its support between $10,000 and $15,000 annually. It is a day- 
school, and in i860 numbered two hundred and sixty boys. 

St. Paul's is a London endowed school, with an income of 
about $50,000, founded in 15 11 by Dr. Colet, Dean of St. 
Paul's, and is under the control of the Mercers' Company. It 
numbers one hundred and forty boys. 

The Grammar-school of Harrow-on-the-Hill was founded 
in 1571 by John Lyon, yeoman, who left by his will estates 
and moneys for the support of a school and the maintenance of 
the highway between Edgeware and London, the latter being 
a very common subjedl of bequests, at a time when the public 
highways of the country were not considered a part of the 
public charge. Eton and Harrow are the two most aristocratic 
of the public schools. Harrow seems to stand some degrees 
above Eton, though below Rugby in efficiency. Though the 
income of the head-master is so enormous, the school is not 
richly endowed. In i860 it numbered four hundred and sixty- 
four boys. Intended, originally, for the sons of the farmers and 
tradesmen of Harrow, it has been wholly diverted from that 
purpose, and turned, like the others, into a great boarding-school 
for the sons of the aristocracy ; tlie boys for whom it was origi- 
nally intended forming, under the name of the "English Form," 
a very insignificant part of it, and having no communication 
whatever with the boarding-school. The number of boys con- 
tained in the latter in i860 was four hundred and sixty-four. 

Rugby, which from comparative obscurity rose to such 
fame through the labors of tlie excellent Dr. Arnold, and 
which is by far the best, as Eton is by far the worst, of tliese 
great schools, was founded in the year 1567 by Lawrence 
Sheriff, citizen and grocer of London. The estates with 
which he endowed it, chiefly in London, have risen immensely 
in value, though the income of the school is small, compared 
with that of Eton. It has averaged for the past seven years 
$28,265. Though founded originally for the children of the 
parishes of Rugby and Brownsover, there is not at present in 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIEXTIFIC STUDIES. 83 

the school a single child from either. Like the rest, it is a great 
boarding-school, numbering in iS6o four hundred and sixt}- 
five boys. 

Shrewsbury is an old school in the West of England, having 
been founded in 1551 by King Edward VI. It is celebrated 
for the accuracy of its classical scholarship, and the great num- 
ber of "honor-men" it produces; but it has a less fortunate 
reputation as being pre-eminent for producing scholars who 
know absolutely nothing but classics. It seems to be in a 
decaying condition- : it has one hundred and thirty-two boys, 
and an income of about $15,000.* 



II. — Page 6'j. 

EXTRACTS FROM EVIDENCE ON THE SUBJECT OF 
SCIENTIFIC EDUCATION. 

From the Evidence of Professor W. B. Carpenter. (Vol. iv. p. 363.) 

(Lord Clarendon.) I believe. Dr. Carpenter, you are Regi- 
strar of the London University? — I am. How long have you 
been Registrar? — Six years. I believe you are likewise a 
member of the Council of the Royal Society? — Yes. . . . Have 
you been able to form any opinion as to the use of the physical 
sciences, as a training of the mind, as compared with pure 
mathematics? — I think that their function is quite different. I 
think that each is a supplement to the other. I should be very 
sorry to see either left out. It appears to me, that the use of 
the physical sciences is to train a class of mental faculties, 



* Whoever wishes for further information respe(5ling these and the 
other endowed Grammar Schools of England, will find it in " Carlisle's 
Endowed Grammar Schools," 2 vols., 1818, or the sumptuously illustrated 
quarto published by Ackermann in 1S16. " The Great Schools of Eng- 
land," by Staunton, is a book advertised as now in press in London. 



84 APPENDIX. 

which are ignored, so to speak, by a purely classical or a 
purely mathematical training, or by both combined. The 
observation of external phenomena, and the eixercise of the 
reasoning faculties upon such phenomena, are matters alto- 
gether left out of the ordinary public-school education. I am 
speaking of schools in which classics and mathematics are the 
sole means of mental discipline. Mathematical training is 
limited to one very special kind of mental adiion. 

In the schools? — I mean, that mathematical training exer- 
cises the mind most strenuously in a very narrow groove, so to 
speak. It starts with axioms which have nothing to do with 
external phenomena, but which the mind finds in itself; and 
the whole science of mathematics may be evolved out of the 
original axioms which the mind finds in itself. I do not go 
into the question, whether they are intuitive, or whether they 
are generalizations of phenomena, found at a very early age ; 
in either case, the mind finds it in itself. Now, it is the essence 
of scientific training, that the mind finds the objedts of its study 
in the external world. As Bacon says. Homo ?ninister et 
interpres naturce; so it appears to me that a training which 
leaves out of view the relation of man to external nature is a 
very defective one, and that the faculties which bring his in- 
telligence into relation with the phenomena of the external 
world are subje<5ls for education and discipline equally import- 
ant with the faculties by which he exercises his reason purely 
upon abstractions. 

Then you consider, that the mind, if it only had the training 
that could be given by close study of classics and of pure 
mathematics, has not had so great an advantage in training 
as if the study of physical science had been added ? — I 
am quite of that opinion ; and I may add, that, having given 
considerable attention to the reputed phenomena of mesmerism, 
electro-biology, spiritualism, &c., I have had occasion to ob- 
serve, that the want of scientijic habits of mind is the source 
of a vast amount of prevalent misconception as to what con- 
stitutes adequate proof of the marvels reported by witnesses, 
neither untruthful nor unintelligent as to ordinary matters. I 
could name striking instances of such misconception in men of 
high literary cultivation or high mathematical attainments ; 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 85 

whilst I have met with no one, who had undergone the disci- 
pline of an adequate course of scientific study, who has not at 
once recognized the fallacies in such testimony when they have 
been pointed out to him. 

(Lord Devon.) I obseixe, Dr. Carpenter, that your matri- 
culation examinations do not take place until the applicant is 
past sixteen? — Yes. 

Being of that age, you see great benefit in making natural 
philosophy and chemistry part of that examination, in addition 
to a certain examination in classics ; and you consider that not 
merely as fitting a boy for success in the aftive business of life, 
but also as a means of training the mind, and that much benefit 
results from such combination. I should like to ask you, 
whether you consider that similar recommendations exist to the 
introduction of physical sciences at an early age ? You applied 
your observations to your own candidates for matriculation ? — 
I think that there is great advantage in commencing very 
early. I have commenced with my own children at a veiy 
early period in training their observing faculties, simply to 
recognize and to understand, and to describe corre6tly what 
they see, — showing them simple experiments, and desiring 
them to write down an account of them ; and, from my own 
experience, I should say, that a boy of ten years old is quite 
capable of understanding a very large proportion of what is 
here set down under the head of natural philosophy. 

(Lord Clarendon.) Is there not a danger of disturbing the 
power of sustained attention, if too many subjects of instruction 
are brought before boys at an early age? — I think that very 
much depends on the manner in which it is done. A good 
teacher need never forfeit the training of sustained attention by 
diredling the attention to the fadls of nature, because the atten- 
tion is as healthfully exercised in what is going on before the 
child as it is in the study of a book. 

Were you at a public school yourself ? — I was not. 

You were at a large classical school, were you not? — I was 
brought up in a private school. 

A large school? — About twenty was the average number. 

Should you, from your experience as a boy, confirm the 
opinion you have now expressed? — In the school in which I 



§6 APPENDIX. 

was brought up, all these subjeds were taught systematically ; 
and I certainly believe, that there was no deficiency there of 
power of attention, and that the training which was given in 
classics and mathematics — which was a very substantial one 
— was not at all impaired by the attention to these other sub- 
jects. 

At what age did attention to these subjefts commence at 
your school? — I should think that about twelve years might 
be taken as the average. 

Have you any pra6lical acquaintance with the system of 
our public schools? — Not pracStically : I know the system gen- 
erally. 

You know the amount of time, perhaps, given to particular 
subjeds, speaking generally? — Yes. 

Have you formed any opinion as to whether it would be 
desirable to diminish the proportion of time given, say to 
classics or mathematics, for the purpose of introducing physical 
science ? — I have formed an opinion, that at the earlier age, 
say from ten to twelve or thirteen, the amount of study given 
to classics may be advantageously diminished. I have been led 
to conclude, from considerable opportunities of obsei^vation, 
that those who have commenced classics later than usual, and 
have been of average intelligence, have, by the age of sixteen, 
acquired as good a classical knowledge as those who have 
begun earlier, — whose minds have been fixed upon classical 
study for two or three years longer. I may state, that that is 
quite the opinion of many gentlemen of very large experience 
in education ; and, I believe, I may quote Professor Pillans, of 
Edinburgh, as entertaining it. Dr. Hodgson, who had for a 
long time a large public school in the neighborhood of Man- 
chester, wrote a pamphlet some years ago in defence of that 
opinion. ... I could quote several instances of young men who 
have shown very remarkable proficiency in classical study at 
the age of sixteen and seventeen, who began very late, — at 
thirteen and fourteen. 

(Lord Devon.) I understand you to attach very high im- 
portance to the philosophical study of language ? — Yes. 

(Lord Clarendon.) And to its being commenced early? — 
Yes 



CLASSIC^LL AXD SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 87 

(Mr. Twisleton.) I believe you are author of a work called 
" The Principles of Physiology, General and Comparative " ? 

— Yes. . 

You are likewise author of a work called " The Microscope 
and its Revelations " ? — Yes. 

I believe you are also author of " An Introduction to the 
study of Foraminifera " ? — Yes. 

Do you consider that your taste for those studies was awak- 
ened at school? — My taste for physical and chemical science 
was certainly awakened at school. The training that I had in 
my school-course, and the advantages which I had of attending 
ledtures at the Philosophical Institution at Bristol, at the time 
that I was going through that course, certainly tended to de- 
velop my taste for science generally. At that time, I knew 
next to nothing of natural history ; and I suppose it was the 
circumstance of my having entered the medical profession, and 
being led to seek for scientific culture in the subjects on which 
medicine is founded, that caused me to direct my attention to 
natural history and physiology, — physiology as based on 
natural history in fixdl. 

You were likewise instrucfted in mathematics at school ? — 
Yes. 

Had you any occasion to observe at school that there was 
one class of minds which had a great aptitude for mathematics, 
another for the physical sciences, and another for the classics ; 
so that there were three different types of mental intelligence ? 

— Yes. 

Do you not consider, that it is an injury to a boy who may 
have a turn for the sciences of observation, or for other natural 
sciences, that he has no instruction in them whatever up to 
the time he is eighteen, — up to the time of his going to the 
University ? — I feel that very strongly. I am quite satisfied . 
that there is such a class of minds. I see it in the candidates 
for our degrees in sciences. Though, the degrees have only 
been instituted two or three years, yet I am quite certain, from 
what I have seen of those who have become candidates for 
them, that there is a very decided aptitude for physical sciences ; 
and that those generally are persons who have a distaste for 
classics. I may say with regard to myself, that I never had 



88 APPENDIX. 

aixy taste for classics. I went through a very long course of 
classical training ■5- and I feel very strongly, indeed, the value 
of the discipline w^hich it gave me : but I never, as a boy, had 
any taste for classics (though now I can come back and read 
a classical author with pleasure), because I was weary of the 
drudgery of the ordinary routine of instrudlion (to which I 
had been subjected from an unusually early age), whilst at 
sixteen my mind was not sufficiently advanced in that dire6tion 
to appreciate the higher beauties of a classical author. For 
instance, I could then read the " Prometheus ; " but I did not 
understand its argument,) 

It would be an injury to the mental capital of a nation, so 
to say, to give no instrudlion to boys in the physical sciences 
up to eighteen? — I should certainly consider that it leaves 
that branch of the mental faculties, which every individual has 
in a certain degree, uncultivated, and would leave without cul- 
tivation those powers which certain individuals have in a very 
remarkable degree. 

Is it not the case, that there are some boys at school who 
have only a slight aptitude for classical studies, who have an 
aptitude for the sciences of observation and the experimental 
sciences? — I am quite certain of that. I have five sons; and, 
in their education, I endeavor to train what I perceive to be 
the special aptitude of each. Thus, my eldest son has shown a 
decided aptitude for the physical and chemical sciences : {lie 
has taken his Bachelor-of-Arts degree in the University, and 
has now taken that of Bachelor of Science. He took the 
Bachelor-of-Arts degree because, at that time, there was no 
degree in science ; he went through the classical training re- 
quired for it, but his whole bent is for the exact sciences. On 
the other hand, my second son has as strong a turn for literar}' 
culture as my eldest son has for scientific ; and I have encouraged 
that just as I would the scientific culture, — taking care, how- 
ever, in each case, that the other subjects were not negleded. ) 

(Mr. Vaughan.) I think you mentioned that you considered 
that the study of physical science at an early age was conducive 
to the cultivation of the intelleftual faculties as well as of the 
senses? — I think so, decidedly, if it is rightly taught. I think 
very much depends upon the teacher.j 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 89 

Do you think that that kind of cultivation of the intelledual 
faculties which physical science requires and encourages is 
such as the man may safely be called upon to go through at an 
early period of life? — I feel quite sure of it, because it is done 
to a very large extent in our National schools, and in our Brit- 
ish and Foreign schools. I happen to know this from this 
circumstance : A few years ago, Lord Ashburton requested 
me to examine for a prize which he at that time gave to the 
masters of schools in, I think, Hampshire, Wiltshire, and Dor- 
setshire. I set three or four papers on physical science and its 
applications, — very much the kind of papers that one would 
set for the matriculation examination, with as much as possible 
of pra6tical application to the common affairs of life, to what I 
think the Dean of Hereford calls " common things," — but re- 
quiring a knowledge of principles ; and I was extremely 
surprised at the excellence of the answers which I got. One 
master, a young man not above twenty years of age, answered 
every question perfe6lly well. 

— Do you think that the mind, ordinarily speaking, is as apt 
for the exercise of its faculties upon the subje6ls of natural sci- 
ence as upon grammar and mathematical subjects at the early 
period of life ? — I should say, more so ; that it is more easy to 
fix a child's attention upon something which it sees than upon 
an abstradlion. 

Do you think that in that point of view, in fa(5l, it is so far a 
subject better calculated to call out a healthy aftion of the rea- 
soning powers than the more abstrad; subje6ls of grammar and 
mathematics? — I think it is at the early period. I think that 
a lad of from ten to twelve years of age is better fitted to be led 
to observe and reason upon what he observes in objective phe- 
nomena than he is to reason upon abstractions. I think that, 
from say twelve years of age, the powers may be healthfully 
exercised upon abstractions ; but, as far as X can judge, a child 
in learning a language learns by rote purely, or almost purely, 
up to say twelve years of age ; but after that he begins, if he is 
well taught, to understand the rationale (so to speak) of the 
rules ; but it is a mere matter of memory with him up to that 
time. 

In fa6l, you doubt whether, in the cultivation of language, 
8* 



90 APPENDIX. 

the reasoning powers are much exercised at all at that time ? — 

Yes 

— Have you been sufficiently in company with youths emerg- 
ing from childhood to say whether there is, in your opinion, at 
all a natural curiosity which arises at that time for the obser- 
vation and comprehension of the phenomena of nature? — I 
should say there is. I have seen a great deal of youths of dif- 
ferent ages in the course of my life. I have been always inter- 
ested in education, and have seen and known a great deal of 
what takes place in education among the humbler classes ; and 
amongst them there is most decidedly a readiness of observa- 
tion, and a readiness of power of apprehension and of reason- 
ing upon phenomena of nature, which shows that that must be 
universal. 

Have yovi observed, that, besides that power, there is a cvu'i- 
osity with regard to the phenomena, and an interest in that 
sense with regard to the phenomena of the outward world ? — 
I think there is, if it is not repressed. My opinion is, that the 
tendency of public-school education is to repress all that curi- 
osity, — to withdraw the attention so completely from those 
subjects that it has no development. 

With regard to the study of language, I think you said, that 
you had had some opportvmity of observing that youths who 
began later could make so much progress, owing to the differ- 
ent state of their faculties then, as that they could recover the 
amount that had been lost to the study of language by deferring 
it? — Yes: providing always that their mental habits have 
been properly trained ; that the power of sustained attention, 
for instance, has been exercised in other ways. . . . 

With regard to their bearing on literary studies, do you think 
that the mixture of the physical sciences with the literary 
studies would be a mixture which would be conducive of 
benefit to both, or otherwise ? — I think decidedly conducive 
of benefit, because I cannot think that any mental training can 
be really adequate which is one-sided ; and, again, all experi- 
ence shows that a change of study from one subje6t to another 
is advantageous in this way, — that it is a positive refreshment 
to the mind. I believe, that a lad who has been exercised a 
certain number of hours in the study of language, or in the 



CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 91 

study of mathematics, would enjoy going to the study of phy- 
sical science. If 'it is properly handled, by a good teacher, he 
would enjoy that as much as he would enjoy going into some 
desultory course of reading for recreation. 

In fact, the exchange would produce.very much less physical 
exhaustion than the continuance of the same study for the same 
number of hours? — Yes : I feel sure of that. I may mention, 
that there is at present going on a good deal of inquiry in 
regard to the nurnber of hours which can be healthfully em- 
ployed in study by the class of children who attend the Na- 
tional and British schools ; and it is a subjedl in which I have 
taken a great deal of interest. I have happened to come in 
contadt with a good many individuals who are working out 
experiments in different ways ; and there is a very general con- 
vidlion amongst the better and more intelligent class of masters 
in those schools, that four hours a day is as much as can be 
healthfully employed in purely intelledtual acquirements by 
children of that class. Now, I believe that the allowance 
which is healthful for children of that class may be, perhaps, 
double for those of an educated class. 

(Lord Clarendon.) At what age? — Say from eight to 
twelve ; but the prevalence of this conviction shows, that the 
malsters, pi-a6lically, do not find that the children learn more 
who are at school for six or seven hours than those who are at 
school only from three and a half to four hours. 

(Mr. Vaughan.) Do you think that you would find a dif- 
ferent, that is, a larger measure of hours suitable to health, if 
there was this difference in studies at different times of the 
day ? — Yes : I feel sure of it, 

I suppose you say that as a physiologist? . . . Yes; I am 
speaking as a physiologist decidedly. I am quite satisfied of it 
as a fact in our mental constitution. . . . 

^ (Sir S. Northcote.) You said just now, that you thought 
there were instances of boys taking up the study of classics late, 
and, if they were properly trained in other ways, making up 
for the lost time by the superiority of their power of applica- 
tion and of learning. Do you think that that might be the case 
also in the study of physical science, that a boy taking to study 
physical science late might make up for lost time by beginning 



ya APPENDIX. 

at an age at which his powers were more developed ? — I have 
no doubt that he might make up for lost time : but I think 
that the natural period for commencing the study of physical 
science is at an earlier age, because I think any right system 
of education will take up the faculties in the order of their 
development ; and it is quite certain, that the observing facul- 
ties are developed before the reasoning powers. An infant, 
during the first year of its life, is educating its observing facul- 
ties in a way we really scarcely give it credit for ; and the 
training of the obsei-ving faculties, by attention to the pheno- 
mena of nature, both in physical and in natural science, seems 
to me to be the natural application of time at the age of say 
from eight to twelve. ... 

You supported your argument by the case of a boy who had 
studied French as an introduftion to the study of Latin and 
Greek, and had not suffered in his classical studies by deferring 
them : would you not think, that a boy would suffer in the 
study of languages by wholly giving his early years to the study 
of physical science, and not taking up language at all till he 
got to the age, say of twelve? — Yes, I think he would. I 
think that negledling the study of language altogether would 
be a very undesirable thing ; but what I mean is this : I should 
prefer to see the faculties which are concerned in the cultiva- 
tion of physical science trained at the earlier period, because I 
believe that is the natural period in which the obsei-ving facul- 
ties and the elementary reasoning processes may be best culti. 
vated, and the period at which the mind is not prepared for the 
more advanced culture of language. 

But is it not the period at which it is also prepared for the 
commencement of the culture of language? — Certainly; but, 
then, I think all that the culture of language may give at that 
period may be given in a smaller number of houi's than are 
usually devoted to it. . . . 

(Mr. Twisleton.) A question was asked as to the possi- 
bility of a boy, well cultivated in classics, making up afterwards 
for deficiency in the natural sciences. Would there not be a 
distindlion between the sciences of observation and the sciences 
of experiment? Is it likely that a grown-up person, or a boy 
beyond a certain age, would make up for the negled of the 



CLASSICAL AND SCIEXTIFIC STUDIES. 93 

faculty of observation ? — I think not so well. If I am allowed 
to do so, I may mention my own experience in the matter. 
My greatest difficulty in the pursuit of systematic zoology and 
botany has arisen, I am quite satisfied, from the circumstance, 
that I was not early trained in those sciences. I can recognize 
a flower or an animal when I see them, and I can remember 
their names. I have no difficulty as to verbal memory ; but I 
have a difficulty in conne6ling the two things, the flower or the 
animal and the name ; and I believe, that, if I had had an early 
training in the habit of systematic nomenclature, I should not 
have experienced that difficulty in later life. 

Is it not, to a certain extent, the case with regard to the 
faculty of observation, as with regard to aptness for rapid calcu- 
lation in arithmetic, that the habit should be acquired early? 
— Yes: I am very strongly of that opinion; and I know that 
it is very easily acquired under proper training. The late Pro- 
fessor Henslow studied the method of teaching natural science, 
I believe, as carefully as any one ; and he was wonderfully suc- 
cessful in training that order of faculties. . . . 

Is it the result of your experience, that, by the exclusion 
of the physical sciences and of the methods of investigation 
employed in their study, the mind does not receive as good a 
training as it might do? — I have been acquainted with several 
gentlemen who have passed with distinftion through a course 
of public school and University training, and who have con- 
fessed to me with regret their inaptitude to understand any 
scientific subjedt whatever, — their want, not only of the knowl- 
edge, but of the mental aptitude. 

That is to say, that you consider that the physical sciences 

and methods of investigation call forth different faculties of the 
mind from those which are developed by the studies of mathe- 
matics and classics? — Yes: I think so very decidedly. 

And that, therefore, by neglefting the physical sciences, 
those faculties lie dormant if they existed? — Yes. 

From the Evidence of Sir Charles Lyell. (Vol. IV. p. 370.) 
(Lord Clarendon.) I believe. Sir Charles, you are the 
author of several works on Geology ? — Yes. 
Also of Travels in America ? — Yes. 



94 APPENDIX. 

And you are a Fellow of the Royal Society? — Yes. 

I believe you took your degree at Oxford? — Yes. 

(Mr. Twisleton.) I believe you took honors at Oxford? — 
Yes. 

And you received a Dodlor's degree at Oxford six or seven 
years ago? — Yes. 

(Lord Clarendon.) As we know your attention has long 
been turned to this subje6t, I would beg to ask you, as the result 
of your observation and experience, what you consider to be 
the position of physical science and natural history in this 
country, as far as regards our educational system? — I think it 
is hardly too strong a term to say, that they have been ignored. 
There has been a move of late in the Universities to restore 
them somewhat to that place which they formerly held, when 
the sciences were much less advanced, but when, in proportion 
to what was then known, they held a very fair position ; and 
within the last two hundred years I consider them to have been 
deprived of the proper position which they once held. The 
public schools being modelled in a great measure on the system 
of the Universities, they have, in like manner, entirely ne- 
gledled them, even in those schools where they are educated 
sometimes up to the age of seventeen or eighteen. I think, 
therefore, that in that period of the progress of the nation, 
when these branches have been acquiring more and more im- 
portance, both theoretically and practically, that has been pre- 
cisely the time when they have been more and more excluded 
from the teaching of the higher classes of this country. 

To what would you attribute the negle<5l of these studies 
that has been shown at the schools in particular? — I think 
that the schools being preparatory, in a great measure, to the 
Universities, they frame their system in regard to those sub- 
jects which are to obtain the chief rewards, prizes, and honoi's 
at the University. Although a large proportion of the boys 
at our larger schools do not go to the University (I do not 
know what proportion, but I know that it is very large), never- 
theless, the system is planned as if they were all going there ; 
and whatever be the plan adopted at the Universities, and, 
particularly, whatever may be the matriculation, the entrance 
examination to the University, that will in no small degree 



CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES.. 95 

govern what is taught in public schools, if any branch of 
knowledge is entirely omitted. . . . 

You consider, then, that as there is no demand for physical 
sciences and natural history at the Universities, there is no 
attempt to supply them at the schools? — Exadlly : that is a 
great reason. However, it must not be forgotten, that those 
schoolmasters are brought up in the Universities without a 
knowledge of the sciences and natural history ; and, having no 
«uch knowledge, it is very natural that a great number of 
them should entertain some prejudice, or think very slightingly 
of them. . . . 

You would consider, then, that although the great majority of 
boys educated at our public schools do not go to the Universi- 
ties, yet the requirements of those who do go to the Universities 
do, in fa6t, regulate the system of the school? — Quite so. 

Therefore, you would say, that the majority do not have the 
education that would be best for them ; and, in fa6t, are sacri- 
ficed to the minority who are proceeding to the University? — 
Yes. . . . 

(Lord Clarendon.) Having considered, as you have, this 
omission of the physical sciences at our schools and Universi- 
ties as a question of national importanc^, and a matter of 
national regret, you must be aware that the excuse is always 
that there is not time ; that the system now pursued at the 
schools, and afterwards at the Universities, is very much de- 
voted to the study of the classics, and precludes absolutely, 
from want of time, the study of these other and important sci- 
ences. Have you ever considered that question of time, and 
how these other studies could be joined to the classical studies, 
without detriment to that which is considered to be the basis of 
our public-school education? — Yes: I think that a great deal 
too much time is given to such things as writing Latin and 
Greek verses, and attempting, even at school, to acquire a de- 
gree of proficiency, which would be very useful if a person 
specialized it afterwards, but which it is not desirable to re- 
quire of young men before they are eighteen ; and that a por- 
tion of that which they now acquire at the public schools should 
be left to be afterwards acquired at the Universities at a later 
age ; and that you should not, at the expense of omitting these 



96 APPENDIX. 

scientific subjefts, devote so very large a portion of time to the 
other departments. 

At our pviblic schools, it is generally considered that the 
study of the classics is the best possible training for the mind ; 
but w^ould you consider that the mind does not get the best 
possible training, if the study of the physical sciences is omit- 
ted? and would you consider that the study of physical science 
calls into operation and develops faculties of the mind that are 
not called into adlivity by classics or mathematics? — Yes : I- 
do most decidedly. I think the reasoning powers and the 
judgment are more cultivated by these subje<5ls than by the 
exclusive study of the classics. 

Of classics and mathematics? — Yes. 

Pure mathematics? — Yes. I think mathematics applied 
often does that which pure mathematics will not do. . . . 

It is sometimes said, with great force, that the faculties of 
observation ripen, so to say, at an earlier period than the rea- 
soning powei's? — Yes. 

-Do you think that that would or would not point to the con- 
clusion, that such sciences as botany and chemistry, perhaps, 
and so on, should be communicated at an earlier period? — 
Yes. I have no cl^ildren of my own, but I have nephews in 
whom I take much interest ; and I certainly have observed that 
the powers of observation, and the interest of obsen^ing with 
accuracy, are very early developed, — indeed, at nine or ten ; 
and they learn a vast deal of other things in consequence, if they 
be taught any of these branches. . . . You would prefer their 
beginning at an early period? — Yes, indeed, I should. . . . 
(Mr. Vaughan.) Do you think that purely literary pursuits, 
and the literature of the country generally, would receive bene- 
fit by a degree of scientific education and instrudtion being 
given in the public schools and the Universities in conjund:ion 
with a literary education? — Indeed, I think it would. I think 
the literature would gain. I think the literary writings of a 
man like Hallam, for instance, who had taught himself science 
and natural history, arei of a higher stamp than they would 
have been if he had not had that knowledge. . . . 

In your geological investigations in Germany, have you 
become acquainted with man}- literary men there? — Yes. 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 97 

Among the class of literary men, is there greater or less 
knowledge of the physical sciences than in England ? — There 
is decidedly more general knowledge, even where there is no 
special knowledge. They understand a great deal more what 
we are about than the literary men and classical scholars of 
tliis country do. . . . 

Have you ever had conversations with men in the small 
towns who have information which you would not be likely to 
find in England ? — Quite so. I may mention Winchester as an 
instance that I have had practical experience of. I have been 
very much struck with it. If you were to go, in Germany, to a 
second-rate school, — I mean a town of second-rate importance, 
— and go to a g}-mnasium there, you would get information on 
scientific points that it would be quite in vain to look for in such 
a magnificently endowed establishment as Winchester. . . . 

(Mr. Thompson.) With regard to the clergy, have you 
seen any thing of the clergy in Germany ? Would you say 
that they were better acquainted with such subjects ? — Yes, 
indeed, I think they are. I think there is a great advantage in 
that respedl in Germany. In fad, it was an observation of 
Baron Von Buch, when he came over here, " In regard to 
Church matters, or the connection of science and religion, you 
are as much behind us in freedom, as you are ahead of us in 
your political institutions ; " and I attribute that, in some mea- 
sure, to there being a better general notion of science among 
the clergy. . . . 

(Mr. Twisleton.) Is it the case, that, in some pradlical 
departments of knowledge, say in your own, there is a difficulty 
of obtaining the assistance of educated men for important 
practical puAposes? — Yes : until the formation of the School of 
Mines in Jermyn Street, which is quite a new establishment, 
it is extraordinary the difficulty there was. If they sent over 
from the Colonies for some one to make a geological survey, or 
to examine into the mines, or if a man like Lord Breadalbane 
offered to give £700 or £800 a year to any one who would 
survey his estate, there was no well-educated man to be found 
in England : our only chance in that case was Scotland. 
Although the mining wealth of this country is very supei'ior to 
that of any other, or almost all the others put together, such 
9 



98 APPENDIX. 

was the negledl of scientific education, in that sense, that we 
had sometimes to send over to Germany to supply a sui-\-eyor. 
. . I think that you would have a greater number of well-edu- 
cated men who would go into these departments, if the elements 
of science were not wholly negle6ted at the great schools. . . . 

Which would you like best to see in public schools, — a 
system of teaching both literature and physical science carried 
throughout the school, and made universal, or a system of 
what is known abroad by the term of" bifurcation ; " by which I 
understand it is meant, that, when boys come to a certain point, 
they should choose whether they would pursue the literary 
or the scientific branches of education? — At what age is that? 
— (Mr. Twisleton.) They leave at eighteen. — (Sir S. North- 
cote.) Fifteen or sixteen, I think; say sixteen. — I have 
not fully considered that point. At the same time, having 
thought over the very great range of subjedls, and the very 
different turn of boys' minds, and the different aptitudes they 
have by nature, I have always been in favor of their being 
allowed to seledt as soon as possible after they have once 
secured the general groundwork. . . . 

(Mr. Vaughan.) Have you any means of knowing whether, 
in the middle classes, there is a greater knowledge on these 
subjedls at present than in the upper classes? — It is a very 
remarkable fadt, that, if a scientific book is published, it 
depends more for its sale on the middle classes of the manu- 
fadturing districts than on the rich country gentlemen and 
clergy of the agricultural parts of the country ; and therefore, if 
there is distress, like the present in Lancashire, the publisher 
would say, " Do not bring out your book now." 

In a political point of view, is not that not only an un- 
healthy, but a dangerous state of things, in some respeds, that 
the material world should be very much better known by the 
middle classes of society than by the upper classes ? — Certain- 
ly ; and I think it is particularly so in reference to the teaching 
in this country by the clergy ; and a vast proportion of the Uni- 
versity men are going into the Church. . . . 

»(Sir S. Northcote.) But if the upper classes, in acquiring a 
greater amount of this knowledge of the physical world, were 
to lose any of their literary and intellectual superiority, might 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIEXTIFIC STUDIES. 99 

they not thereby endanger their pre-eminence as much in the 
one way as they would gain in the other? — In answer to that 
question, I think I could say, from my own exiDcrience, that, in 
consequence of narrowing the number of subjects taught, a 
large portion of those who have not a particular aptitude for 
literary pursuits, but who would have shown a strong taste for 
the sciences, are forced into one line ; and, after they leave their 
College, they negledt branches they have been taught, and so 
cultivate neither the one nor the other. I have known men, 
quite late in life, who have forgotten all the Latin and Greek 
which they spent their early years in acquiring, hit upon 
geology or some other branch, and all at once their energies 
have been awakened, and you have been astonished to see how 
they came out. They would have taken that line long before, 
and done good work in it, had they been taught the elements of 
it at school. 

r^- (Mr. Twisleton.) So that there was a mental waste in 
their youth ? — Quite so. 

From the Evide7ice of Professor Faraday. (Vol. iv. p. 375.) 

(Lord Clarendon.) I believe you were at one time In- 
structor for the Government at Woolwich : were you not ? — I 
was. 

For how long? — For twenty years. I was Professor of 
Chemistry there ; or Lecturer on Chemistry, I should rather 
say, because the Professorship passed away with McCulloch, 
and was not renewed until I left. I am also one of the Senate 
of the London University', — one of the original nominees. 

I believe you have been in the habit of le6luring at the 
Royal Institution? — I have. 

For how many years ? — For a good many years. I cannot 
tell how many. And you have also been in the habit of giv- 
ing juvenile ledlures? — I have. Will you have the goodness 
to give us your opinion, as the result of your observation and 
experience, upon the state of knowledge of the physical 
sciences and natural history in this country with reference to 
»our educational system? — I can give you my impression, as 
far as that is permissible, independent of any comparison 
between that part of knowledge and other branches. I am not 



100 APPENDIX. 

an educated man, according to the usual phraseology, and 
therefore can make no comparison between languages and 
natural knowledge, except as regards the utility of language in 
conveying thoughts ; but that the natural knowledge which has 
been given to the world in such abundance during the last fifty 
years should remain, I may say, untouched, and that no suffi- 
cient attempt should be made to convey it to the young mind, 
growing up and obtaining its first views of these things, is to 
me a matter so strange that I find it difficult to understand it. 
Though I think I see the opposition breaking away, it is yet a 
very hard one to overcome. That it ought to be overcome, I 
have not the least doubt in the world. . . . 

(Lord Clarendon.) You pi'obably are aware that what our 
great schools profess and aim at most, is to give a good training 
to the mind ; and it is there considered, perhaps, as you were 
saying just now, from habit and from prestige, that that is 
effectually done by the study of the classics and of pure 
mathematics, and that in that way they furnish the best train- 
ing of the mind that can be given. Now, I would ask you, 
whether you think, supposing the training of the mind is the 
objedt in the public schools, that that system of training the 
mind is complete which excludes physical science? whether 
the study of physical science would call into activity facilities of 
the mind that are not so developed by studies confined to clas- 
sics and mathematics? — The phrase, "training of the mind," 
has to me a very indefinite meaning. I would like a profound 
scholar to indicate to me what he means by " training of the 
mind ; " in a literary sense, including mathematics. What 
is their efte<5l on the mind? What is the kind of result that is 
called the "training of the mind"? Or what does the mind 
learn by that training? It learns things, I have no doubt. By 
the very a6t of study, it learns to be attentive, to be persevering, 
to be logical according to the word " logic." But does it learn 
that training of the mind which enables a man to give a reason, 
in natural things, for an effeft which happens from certain 
causes, or why in any emergency or event he ctees or should 
do this, that, or the other? It does not suggest the least thing* 
in these matters. It is the highl}'- educated man that we find 
coming to us, again and again, and asking the most simple 



CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 101 

questions in chemistry and mechanics ; and when we speak of 
such things as the conser\'ation of force, the permanency 
of matter, and the unchangeabiHty of the laws of natvu-e, they 
are far from comprehending them, though they have relation 
to us in every action of our lives. Many of these instrufted 
persons are as far from having the power of judging of these 
things as if their minds had never been trained. 

You would not consider that the minds of such men as you 
allude to, who have been highly trained, and who have great 
literary proficiency, are in a state readily to receive such infor- 
mation as they are deficient in? — I find them greatly deficient ; 
not in their own studies, or in their applications of them, but 
when taken out of that into natural sciences. Ask what is the 
reason of this or that, — they have a difficulty in giving 
the reason. If they are called upon to judge in a case of 
natural science, they find it difficult to give a judgment ; they 
have not studied it. 

- You do not find any particular aptitude in those minds for 
grasping a new subje6t? — I do not. Take those minds, and 
apply them to the special subje<5ls which they have never 
touched upon or known of, and they have to go to the begin- 
ning, just as the juvenile does. They are no more ready. The 
young mind, as I find it, formed by habits, forced this way and 
that way, is very observant, and asks most acute questions. I 
do not find that mind, generally speaking, backward in under- 
standing the statement I make to him in simple language ; and 
if I tell him this or that, — if I tell him that the atmosphere is 
compounded of oxygen, nitrogen, and so on, and then shape it 
into a question, — he can generally answer me. I must confess 
to you, that I find the grown-up minds coming back to me with 
the same questions over and over again. They ask. What is 
water composed of ? though I have told the same persons, a 
dozen years in succession, that it is composed of oxygen and 
hydrogen. Their minds are not prepared to receive or to 
embody these notions ; and that is where you want education, 
— to teach them the A B C of these things. 

You think that exclusive attention to one set of studies dur- 
ing early life rather precludes the ready adoption of these 
ideas? — Yes. It does not blunt the mind, — I do not think it 



102 APPENDIX. 

does, — but it so far gives the growing mind a certain habit, 
a certain desire and wilHngness to accept general ideas of a 
literary kind, and to say all the rest is nonsense, and belongs 
to the artisan, that it is not prepared to accept, and does not 
accept, the other and greater knowledge. 

So that the mind runs in a particular groove, from which it 

does not extract itself easily ? — Yes : by that degree of habit, 

the mind, I do think, is really injured for the reception of other 

knowledge. . . . Supposing the one main objedt of education to 

be to train the mind to ascertain the sequence of a particular 

conclusion from certain premises ; to detect a fallacy ; to corredl 

undue generalization ; or generally to prevent the gi"owth of 

mistakes in reasoning, — should you consider physical science 

is as valuable for that objedl as classical instru6tion is? — I do 

not see clearly how classical studies do educate the mind for that 

kind of judgment; but, as regards the exercise of the judgment 

on the laws of matter, it is to me the most fertile source of the 

exercise of that judgment, and the true logic of fa6ts, which I can 

conceive of, and which enables the man, when he has the fa6ls 

in his hand, to apply them in every fox'm and shape. ... I think 

I see a most lamentable deficiency, even in the highly educated 

men, of that kind of logic. ... I hope I shall ofiend nobody if I 

try to illustrate my feeling in that respedt. Up to this very day, 

there come to me persons of good education, men and women, 

quite fit for all that you expe6l from education : they come to me, 

and they talk to me about things that belong to natural science; 

about mesmei"ism, table-turning, flying through the air ; about 

the laws of gravity : they come to me to ask me questions ; and 

they insist against me, who think I know a little of these laws, 

that I am wrong and they are right, in a manner which shows 

how little the ordinary course of education has taught such 

minds. Let them study natural things, and they will get a very 

different idea from that which they have obtained from that 

education. It happens up to this day. I do not wonder at 

those who have not been educated at all ; but such as I refer to, 

say to me, " I have felt it, and done it, and seen it ; and, though 

I have not flown through the air, I believe it." Persons who 

have been fully educated, according to the present system, come 

with the same propositions as the untaught, and stronger ones, 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 103 

because they have a stronger convi6lion that they are right. 
They are ignorant of their ignorance at the end of all that edu- 
cation. It happens even with men who are excellent mathema- 
ticians. They and you will say, " But you are most likely 
wrong, and they right." It may be so ; at all events the educa- 
tion we speak of in natural things will be something in 
addition to that which they gain by their study of the classics. 
Until they know what are the laws of nature, and until they 
are taught by education to see what are the natural fadls,. 
they cannot clear their minds of these, as I say, most absurd 
inconsistencies ; and I say again, as I said once before, that the 
system of education that could leave the mental condition of 
the public body in the state in which this subjedl has found it, 
must have been greatly deficient in some very important prin- 
ciple. 

(Lord Lyttleton.) When you say that you have not been 
able to understand in what way classical instru6tion trains the 
mind, you are aware that many, perhaps most, of the defenders 
of classical education defend it on the giound, not that it 
teaches certain things, nor that the classics as classics have any 
peculiar value ; but that, through the classics, both the laws of 
language and the stiaidture of language are studied ; and that it 
is the study of the laws of language which is held best to 
develop and strengthen the mental faculties? — That is narrow- 
ing the qviestion this way, that, in place of saying you are 
taking the classics, you take the laws of language ; and no 
doubt they give that education, as far as I can see. I am rea- 
soning in the dark, because I have not had the opportunity, and 
have not the right, to speak of these things. I confess all that ; 
but although it be a very important thing to know language 
perfeftly, and to know its laws, or to carry it out, as the 
most profound scholar would do, by tracing all languages to 
an original one, or what not, — Max Miiller or anybody else, 
— that is not all knowledge. I am not attacking the classics at 
all. I am only putting in a plea for that other knowledge 
which belongs to our absolute nature, and in fadl which lan- 
guage only helps to describe. 

- — What is held, I believe, by the defenders of classical litera- 
ture is, that the study of language strengthens the general 



104 APPENDIX. 

powers of the mind in its application to any other subjects what- 
ever which may come before it, and that in that way the mind 
is best strengthened as an instrument for acquiring any other 
kind of knowledge whatever? — I see the value of those studies 
which do lead to such a result ; but I think, that, at present, 
society at large is almost ignorant of the like and greater 
value of the kind of studies which I recommend. ... I say, that 
these physical sciences, in my opinion, ought to be brought for- 
ward also ; and I say it the more boldly, because the learned 
men who have been so educated in languages do not show any 
aptness to judge of physical science. In matters of natural 
knowledge, and all the uses and applications derived from it, I 
should turn to a man, untaught in other respects, who I knew 
was acquainted with these subjects, rather than to a classical 
scholar, as expe6ting to find within his range that mode of 
mind, or that management of the mind, which would enable 
him to speak with understanding. Any word that I have said 
that has led you to think that I am opposed to classics, I must 
withdraw. I have no such feeling. 



From the Evidence of Professor Otven. (Vol. iv. p. 387.) 

The result of your observation, coming in communication, 
as you must have done, with various classes, — the wealthy, 
the middle, and the poor, — I suppose is, that there exists a 
complete deficiency in knowledge of physical science and 
natural history.-' — The absence of a knowledge of the main 
end, methods, and application of natural history has appeared 
to me to be greater in the higher and more refined classes of 
the community, than in the middle or perhaps even, as regards 
details or species, than in the lower classes. If I were to seledl 
a particular group, it would be the governing and legislative 
class ; which, from the opportunities I have had of hearing 
remarks in conversation or debate, appears to be least aware of 
the extent of the many departments of natural-histor}' science, 
of the import of its generalizations, and especially of its use in 
disciplining the mind, irrespective of its immediate objedl of 
making known the different kinds of animals, plants, or inin- 
erals. 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 105 

I suppose, when you attribute this state of ignorance to the 
higher classes, you alhide to the absence of instru6tion, both at 
the pubHc schools and the Universities, at which these classes, 
in particular, are educated? — More especially at the public 
schools. . . . 

— I suppose you would consider that is not the best training 
which omits the physical sciences? — Not the completest. 
Grammar and classics, arithmetic and geometiy, may be the 
most important disciplinary studies. We know the facul- 
ties of the mind they are chiefly calculated to educe ; but 
they fail in bringing out those which natural-history science 
more especially tends to improve. I allude now to the faculty 
of accurate observation, of the classification of fadls, of the co- 
ordination of classes or groups ; tlie management of topics, for 
example, in their various orders of importance in the mind, 
giving to a writer or public speaker improved powers of classi- 
fying all kinds of subjects. Natural history is essentially a 
classifying science. Order and method are the faculties which 
tlie elements and principles of the science are best adapted to 
improve and educe. ... In ever}^ community of two hundred or 
more youths, there must be some few, the constitution of whose 
minds is specially adapted to the study of natural history, to 
the work of obsen^ation and classification, who consequently 
are impelled by innate aptitude to that kind of study, but who 
ai^e not at present afforded the slightest opportunity of working 
their minds in that way ; so that it may happen that the faculty 
or gift for natural history, if it be not adlually destroyed by 
exclusive exercise in uncongenial studies, is never educed. 
What is the result? In all our great natural-history move- 
ments, we have looked in vain, since the death of Sir Joseph 
Banks, for any man having a sufficient standing in the country 
to fraternize with us, to understand us, to help us in debate or 
council in questions most vital to the interests of natural his- 
tory. It has often occurred to me to ask how such should be 
the case ; and my answer has been, that, in the education of 
noblemen and gentlemen, the great landed proprietors of 
England, of those destined to take part in the legislation and 
government of the country, there has been a complete absence 
of a systematic imparting of the elements of natural history ; no 



106 APPENDIX. 

demonstrations of the nature and properties of plants and ani- 
mals ; no indication of the aims and importance of natural 
history; no training of the faculties, for which it affords the 
healthiest exercise : consequently they have not been educed. 
I cannot doubt that this must have been the effe6l of the present 
restridted system. There must have been by nature many Sir 
Joseph Banks's since he died : but they have been born, have 
grown up, and passed away without working out their destined 
purpose ; their peculiar talent has never been educed ; their 
attention has never been turned to those studies : but they have 
been wholly devoted to classics. It must be remembered, that 
minds of this class are usually very averse to classical studies, 
and mere exercises of memory and composition : they never 
take to them ; they get through them as well or as ill as they 
can, doing little or nothing to the purpose ; and they fail to 
achieve that for which they are naturally fitted, from the want 
of having their special faculties educed. I consider it a loss to 
the nation, that, in our great educational establishments for 
youth, there should be no arrangements for giving them the 
chance of knowing something of the laws of the living world, 
and how they are to be studied. . . . 

Do you think there would be much difficulty in getting 
teachers, say for the seven or eight principal schools of the 
country, to undertake that work ? — I am afraid at the present 
time that there would be, arising from the general defe6ts of 
our teaching arrangements, especially the want of systematic 
teaching of the elements of natural history in schools. We are 
all of us, as it were, naturalists by accident. It is the percep- 
tion of that difficulty which has led me, on every occasion when 
I have been called upon to give evidence on the subje6t, to 
urge the giving of elementary instruction in natural history as 
one of the duties that should be attached to the keeper of 
each secondary or subordinate department in gi'eat national 
museums of natural history. . . . 

Do you consider that there exist at present good elementary 
works, on which a teacher might rely for assistance? — No: 
it would be very difficult to sele6t one to answer that pur- 
pose ; the demand has not arisen, and therefore there is not the 
supply. 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIEXTIFIC STUDIES. 107 

It would not be difficult to write one ? — More difficult than 
is generally thought. Good elementarj^ books on science are 
very rare. 

In Germany do you know any good elementarj' books, or in 
France ? — Yes : they have good elementary books in both 
countries. In France there is an excellent elementary work on 
Zoology, by Professor Milne Edwards.* . . . 
"~ Have you obsen-ed at school and in life since, that there are 
three distindl types of mind, that some boys have a predomi- 
nant turn for languages, others for mathematics, and others for 
the sciences of observation, and other natural sciences? — 
These are the three principal distinctions that one observes in 
all schools, no doubt. 

Taking a school like Eton, where there are eight hundred 
boys altogether, can you entertain any doubt that tiiere are many 
boys at that school whose predominant type of mind is for the 
study of natural science ? — I have no doubt of it ; and I have 
had complaints uttered to me by gentlemen who have been 
educated at Eton, and have afterwards, under consequent disad- 
vantage and difficulty, followed their own bias in favor of the 
natural sciences, and who have regretted deeply that they never 
had an opportunity of learning the elementary principles of 
natural history. 

Do you not think it is a great hardship to some boys, that 
they have to remain at school perhaps till eighteen years of 
age, without receiving any instrudtion on these subje6ts, for 
which they have a natural aptitude? — I think it not only a 
hardship, but an injury. 

(Mr, Thompson.) You say that many of those sciences are 
in a progressive state ? — Every science we are acquainted with 
is one of progress. 

But the principles of some of the sciences are determined ; 
such as those of mathematics, for instance ? — The fundamen- 
tal principles of classification in natural history are as certain. 

Take this case : fifty years ago, supposing zoology to have 
been taught in schools, would not the Linn^an system have 
been adopted? — You mighfe teach the main part of that system, 

* Translated bj Knox, 2d ed., London, 1S64. 



108 APPENDIX. 

in reference to botany, as a disciplinary science at the present 
day. 

I was thinking of the study of zoology? — In zoology, 
although of course there has been a great increase in the 
knowledge of the structure of animals since the time of 
LinnjEus, still the principles laid down in Linnasus's immortal 
work, " Philosophia Botanica," are really those that cannot be 
deviated from, whether the elements of zoology or botany 
be imparted. 

You do not think there is any objection to the educational 
use of the physical sciences in consequence of the fluctuating or 
speculative character of those sciences? — I deny the " fludluat- 
ing character : " it is not applicable to natural history. The 
zoological system of Ray is the basis of the system of Lin- 
naeus. It forms an essential part of the Linnsean system. 
There is neither fluctuation nor speculation. The principles 
of natural histoiy are already as settled and fixed as can be 
needed for its use as a disciplinary science. Modification of 
details would never affeft its value in relation to elementary 
teaching. 

The zoological classifications of the ancients were some- 
what puerile, were they not, even the classification of Aristotle ? 
— No : it is surprising how much of Aristotle's system is really 
retained ; how much is founded on truth, and is the basis of 
the modern classification. 

Plato was the first writer on classification, I think : Aristotle 
is very severe on him, if I remember rightly? — I am not sure. 
But the improvement that Cuvier made on the zoological 
system of Linnasus was mainly a revival of the Aristotelian 
principles, because Cuvier was the first modern systematist who 
had any thing like the same amount of knowledge of the struc- 
ture of animals which that wonderful man, Aristotle, possessed. 

(Mr. Vaughan.) I suppose that, in reference to the point 
on which Professor Thompson has just been speaking, it is tlie 
case in all but the most abstradt sciences, in all branches of 
human knowledge, that there is some change of a progressive 
nature in the truths that are enunciated? — The amount of 
change, as afleCling the great body of the doctrines, of course 
varies with the state of our knowledge. 



CLASSICAL AXD SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 10 

I suppose that, if we were to wait in order to teach the sub- 
ject until we entirely escaped the possibility of there being 
some change in the form and substance of the truths taught, 
we should have to wait for ever in all sciences : should we not? 
— We should certainly have to wait for the termination of our 
existence as a species. 

(Mr. Thompson.) Not with respedt to arithmetic, for 
instimce? — In Transactions of Societies and Academies of the 
Natural Sciences, we see annual progi'ess and discoveries in 
mathematics ; the sciences, in regard to the works of nature or 
of the Author of nature, are more incomplete ; and the more we 
know of them, the more we get impressed with the small 
amount of knowledge we possess. But that amount, compared 
with ignorance, is so great, and the principles that we are 
enabled to educe from the little that we do know are so sure, 
that, taking them at the present very imperfect standard, 
whether in respedl to zoology or botany or geology, they are as 
good for the purposes of elementary instruction and discipline 
as they will perhaps be ten thousand years hence. 

There is another point upon which I should like to have 
your opinion, which is a practical matter entirely, with refer- 
ence to natural history and philosophy. Has it occurred to 
you to observe, whether persons in the upper classes of society, 
and other members of society, are well or ill acquainted with 
the physiological laws of the human stru6ture ? — No : it is a 
knowledge very rarely possessed, as far as my experience goes, 
very rarely indeed ; and I believe that it is chiefly upon that 
general ignorance that the success of spurious systems of medi- 
cine have their dependence. It is upon the general ignorance 
of the population that the empiric bases his pretensions, and 
has an influence for a certain time, till one subsides, and is sucr 
ceeded by another. ... In reference to the conclusion to which 
I have come in regard to the importance of natural history as 
an element of school instruction, and the time to be given to it 
in beginning the experiment, I would ask leave to read a pas- 
sage from the address of a gentleman who fills a very eminent 
position, — that of Local Director of the Geological Survey of 
Ireland, and LeClurer on Geology to the Museum of Irish In- 
dustry, Mr. J. B. Jukes; who, in opening the business of the 



110 APPENDIX. 

Geological Se6lion of the British Association, over which he 
presided at Cambridge, made these remarks : " The natural 
sciences are now considered as worthy of study by those who 
have a taste for them, both in themselves and as a means of men- 
tal training and discipline. In my time, however, no other 
branches of learning were recognized than classics and mathe- 
matics ; and I have, with some shame, to confess, that I dis- 
played but a truant disposition with respe6t to them, and too 
often hurried from the tutor's le(5ture-room to the river or field 
to enable me to add much to the scanty store of knowledge I 
had brought up with me. Had it not been then for the teaching 
of Professor Sedgwick in geology, my time would have been 
altogether wasted," So that it was just the accident, so to speak, 
of one short course on a branch of natviral history, grafted 
through an old bequest upon the main studies of his University, 
that led Professor Jukes to his appreciation of the method of 
study and value of the science which owes so much to his labors. 
I could also, with your permission, adduce a higher authority 
on the main point, and that is Baron Cuvier's ; who, in the 
preface to the first edition of his elementary book on Natural 
-History, expresses himself as follows : " The habit, necessarily 
acquired in the study of natural history, of mentally classifying 
a great number of ideas, is one of the advantages of this 
science which is seldom spoken of, and which, when it shall 
have been generally introduced into the system of common 
education, will perhaps become the principal one : it exercises 
the student in that part of logic which is termed ' method,' as 
the study of geometry does in that which is called ' syllogism ; ' 
because natural history is the science which requires the most 
precise methods, as geometry is that which demands the 
most rigorous reasoning. Now, this art of method, when 
once well acquired, may be applied with infinite advantage to 
studies the most foreign to natural history. Every discus- 
sion which supposes a classification of fa^ls, every research 
which requires a distribution of matters, is performed after the 
same manner ; and he who has cultivated this science merely 
for amusement, is surprised at the facilities it afibrds for 
disentangling all kinds of affairs. It is not less useful in 
solitude ; sufficiently extensive to satisfy the most powerful 



CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. Ill 

mind ; sufficiently various and interesting to calm the most 
agitated soul : it consoles the unhappy, and tends to allay 
enmity and hatred. Once elevated to the contemplation of 
the harmony of nature, irresistibly regulated by Providence, 
how weak and trivial appear those causes which it has been 
pleased to leave dependent upon the will of man ! How aston- 
ishing to behold so many fine minds consuming themselves so 
uselessly for their own happiness and that of others, in the 
pursuit of vain combinations, the very traces of which a few 
years suflSce to obliterate ! I avow it proudly, these ideas 
have always been present to my mind, the companions of 
my labors ; and if I have endeavored, by every means in my 
power, to advance this peaceful study, it is because, in my 
opinion, it is more capable than any other of supplying that 
want of occupation which has so largely contributed to the 
troubles of our age." 

From the Evidence of Dr. J. Hooker. ("Vol. iv. p. 382.) 

(Lord Clarendon.) I believe you are a Fellow of the Royal 
Society ? — Yes. 

And Assistant-Dire6lor of the Botanical Gardens at Kew ? 
— Yes. 

You are the author of " Travels in the Himalaya"? — 
Yes. 

From your experience, and the means of observation you 
have had, have you formed any opinion as to the state of 
knowledge in natural and physical science, with resped; to the 
education of the upper and middle classes, as it exists at 
present? — At Kew, we are thrown into contact with persons 
belonging to the middle and upper classes in very large num- 
bers ; and I think the regret that they knew nothing of botany 
is quite apparent in all their communications with us. Hardly 
a day passes but what we receive communications from some 
part of the world in which such regret is expressed. 

What is the nature of the communications into which you 
are brought with these classes at Kew ? — Most prominently 
now with regard to vegetable fibres. Sometimes two or three 
letters a day come to us requiring information with regard to 
well-known fibres, which the slightest habit of observation, or 



112 APPENDIX. 

the slightest knowledge, would assure the persons who send 
them that they cannot, in any way, be used for cotton. 

Then these have been comparatively recent communica- 
tions? — No: they have gone on for the last twenty years of 
my father's experience, and the last ten years of my own ; not 
so much formerly with regard to cotton fibre for the use of 
yarns as for making paper, and for many other purposes to 
which cotton is applied. 

In fadl, you say, that the upper and middle classes in this 
country are in the habit of constantly consulting either your 
father or yourself at Kew? — Yes, both officially and unoffi- 
cially. 

And both the subjedls upon which they wish to have knowl- 
edge, and their mode of inquiry, lead you to think that they are 
in a state of great ignorance ? — Yes. 

That that study in particular has been greatly negle6led by 
those classes ? — Very greatly. 

And they have generally expressed their regret that it has 
been so negledled? — Universally, I may say. 

You have probably considered that the negledl of this 
important study is a matter of national regret ? — I have always 
thought so. 

Have you ever turned your attention at all to the possibility 
of teaching botany to boys in classes at school? — I have 
thought that it might be done very easily ; that this deficiency 
might be easily remedied. 

What are your ideas on the subje(5l ? — My own ideas are 
chiefly drawn from the experience of my father-in-law, the late 
Professor Henslow, Professor of Botany at Cambridge. He 
introduced botany into one of the lowest possible class of 
schools, — that of village laborers' children in a remote part 
of Suffolk. 

Perhaps you will have the goodness to tell us the system he 
pursued? — It was an entirely voluntary system. He offered 
to enroll the school children in a class to be taught botany once 
a week. The number of children in the class was limited, I 
think, to forty-two. As his parish contained only one thousand 
inhabitants, there never were, I suppose, the full forty-two chil- 
dren in the class ; their ages varied from about eight years old 



CLASSICAL ANB SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 113 

tp about fourteen or fifteen. The class mostly consisted of 
girls. . . . He required, that, before they were enrolled in the 
class, they should be able to spell a few elementary botanical 
terms, including some of the most difficult to spell, and those 
that were the most essential to begin with. Those who 
brought proof that they could do this were put into the third 
class ; then they were taught once a week, by himself generally, 
for an hour or an hour and a half, sometimes for two hours 
(for they were exceedingly fond of it). 

Did he use to take them out in the country, or was it 
simply lessons in the school? — He left them to colled; for 
themselves; but he visited his parish daily, when the children 
used to come up to him, and bring the plants they had col- 
le6ted; so that the lessons went on all the week round. There 
was only one day in the week on which definite instruftion was 
given to the class ; but on Sunday afternoon he used to allow 
the senior class, and those who got marks at the examinations, 
to attend at his house. . . . 

Did he find any difficulty in teaching this subjedt in class? 

— None whatever ; less than he would have had in dealing 
with almost any other subject. 

Do you know in what way he taught it? did he illustrate 
it? — Invariably: he made it practical. He made it an objec- 
tive study. The children were taught to know the plants, and 
to pull them to pieces ; to give their proper names to the parts ; 
to indicate the relations of the parts to one another ; and to- 
find out the relation of one plant to another by the knowledge 
thus obtained. 

They were children, you say, generally from eight to twelve ? 

— Yes, and up to fourteen. 

And they learnt it readily? — Readily and voluntarily, en- 
tirely. 

And were interested in it? — Extremely interested in it. 
They were exceedingly fond of it. 

Do you happen to know whether Professor Henslow 
thought that the study of botany developed the faculties of the 
mind, — that it taught these children to think? and do you 
know whether he perceived any improvement in their mental 
faculties from that? — Yes: he used to think it was the most 



114 APPENDIX. 

important agent that could be employed for cultivating their 
faculties of observation, and for strengthening their reasoning 
powers. 

He really thought that he had arrived at a pra<5lical result? 
— Undoubtedly; and so did every one who visited the school 
or the parish. 

They were children of quite the lower class? — The labor- 
ing agricultural class. 

And in other branches receiving the most elementary 
instru(5tion ? — Yes. 

And Professor Henslow thought that their minds were more 
developed ; that they were become more reasoning beings, 
from having this study superadded to the others? — Most decid- 
edly. It was also the opinion of some of the inspe6tors of 
schools, who came to visit him, that such children were in 
general more intelligent than those of other parishes ; and they 
attributed the difference to their observant and reasoning facul- 
ties being thus developed. ... 

So that the intelledtual success of this obje6tive study was 
beyond question? — Beyond question. ... In condu(5ling the 
examinations of medical men for the army, which I have 
now condudled for several years, and those for the East-India 
Company's service, which I have conduced for, I think, seven 
years, the questions which I am in the habit of putting, and 
which are not answered by the majority of the candidates, 
are what would have been answered by the children in 
Professor Henslow's village school. I believe the chief rea- 
son to be, that these students' obsei-ving faculties, as children, 
had never been trained, — such faculties having lain dormant 
with those who naturally possessed them in a high degree ; 
and having never been developed, by training, in those who 
possessed them in a low degree. In most medical schools, the 
whole sum and substance of botanical science is crammed into 
a few weeks of lectures, and the men leave the class without 
having acquired an accurate knowledge of the merest elements 
of the science, ... 

At the High School in Glasgow, did yoli observe among the 
boys a diffei-ence of aptitude for the three branches of languages, 
mathematics, and the sciences of observation ? — Very great. 



CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 115 

. -A boy who distinguishes himself in classics might have an 

inaptitude for mathematics and natural science, and vice 
versa? — Yes. One of my own classmates was a dull boy 
in the High School, where mathematics were not then taught, 
except in the senior class, which I did not attend. He was the 
best mathematician of his year at the University afterwards. 

Do you not think that it is very undesirable that a boy 
at school, having faculties of a particular kind, should have 
them wholly negledted? Take the example of a boy who has 
really an aptitude for the natural sciences, do you not think it 
a very hard case that his faculties should be wholly negledled ? 

— I think it is very hard. Nothing is more destructive to his 
whole education. 

Supposing that a boy happened not to have a turn for lan- 
guages, his place in school would be very low down. Would 
it not have an injurious moral effedl habitually for him to be 
regarded as stupid, because he had no talent for languages? 

— Yes. 

"^ It would have a tendency to impair his self-respe6t ? — Yes, 

- The same boy, if he had an opportunity of cultivating his 

faculties in the natural sciences, and using his abilities there, 

would be likely to become a much more useful member of 

society? — Yes, much more. . . . 

(Lord Clarendon.) The majority of the young men who 
are*intended for the medical profession, and who come from 
the various public schools of the country, scarcely ever bring 
with them any physical science : do they ? — None whatever, 
or very rarely. 

As far as your observation goes, that is generally negleded 
in your profession? — Yes; and it is a want more felt by 
medical men than by any others. The amount of botany and 
chemistry required by the medical man might be as easily 
obtained at school, as during the time he is undergoing his 
medical curriculum. 

I suppose you have found a sentiment of regret prevailing 
amongst them at the manner in which those valuable years of 
their lives had been employed? — Very generally. 

And they would have liked to have spent them differently ? 

— Yes, to a great extent. I never knew them regret their 



116 APPENDIX. 

classics and mathematics ; quite the contrary : but they do 
regret very much that their faculties were not early trained to 
habits of observation. When they go round the hospitals, they 
have felt that they have not been taught to observe, and to 
reason upon what they observe, as might have been. 

Do you think there is a general feeling amongst these men, 
that the study of physical science might have been added to 
the classics, without impairing that knowledge which they 
would be glad to have acquired ? — That was the universal 
feeling. 



From a Communication to the Commissioners, from Sir jf. F. W. 
Hersckel. (Vol. ii. p. 47.) 

" Regarding as a ' Public School ' any considerable per- 
manent educational establishment, in which a large number 
of youths go through a fixed and uniform course of school 
instru(5lion, from the earliest age at which boys are usually 
sent to school to that in which they either enter the Univer- 
sity, or pass in some other mode into manly life, and in 
which it is understood that the education is what is called a 
liberal one, with no special professional bias or other avowed 
objedl than to form a youth for general life and civilized 
society, I should consider any system radically faulty which 
should confine itself to the study of the classical languifges, 
and to so much of Greek and Roman history as is necessary to 
understand the classical authors as its main and primary fea- 
ture ; and should admit, and that relu6lantly, a mere minimum 
of extra-classical teaching. Such a system must necessarily, 
I conceive, suffer the reasoning faculty to languish and become 
stunted and dwarfed for want of timely exercise in those 
years between fourteen and twenty, when the mind has 
become capable of consecutive thought, and of following out a 
train of consecutive argument to a logical conclusion. In 
those years it is quite as important that youths should have 
placed in their hands, and be obliged to study, books which may 
best initiate them in this domain of human thought, as in that 
of classical literature. To be able to express one's self fluently 
in Greek or Latin, prose or verse ; to have attained an exten- 



CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. 117 

sive familiarity with ancient literature, and a perfecl knowledge 
of the niceties of its grammar, prosody, and idiom, — all, in 
short, which is included in the idea of classical scholarship, — 
is no doubt very desirable.; and I should be one of the last 
to depreciate it. But it is bought too dear, if obtained at 
the sacrifice of any reasonable prospedl of improving the gen- 
eral intelledlual character by acquiring habits of concentrated 
thought, by familiarizing the mind with the contemplation of 
abstract truth, and by accustoming it to the attitude of investi- 
gation, indudtion, and generalization, while it is yet plastic and 
impressible." 



THE END. 



Boston : Printed by John Wilson & Son. 



1865.] English University Education. 615 ^ 

Art. VI. — 1. On the Cam. Lectures on the University ofi/^ 
Cambridge in England. By William Everett, A. M. Cam- 
bridge. 1865. ,/* 

2. Education in Oxford. By James E. Thorold Rogers,/^ 
Tooke Professor of Economic Science in King's College, 
Sometime Public Examiner in Oxford, and one of the Dele- 
gates of the Oxford Local Examinations. 

3. The Students' Guide to the University of Cambridge. Cam- 
bridge, England. 1862. 

4. National Review. Vol. II. University Reform, — Cam- 
bridge. 

5. Pass and Class. By Montagu Burrows. Oxford and 
London. 1861. 

The book of Mr. Everett, whose title we have placed at the 
head of our article, contains a course of lectures delivered be- 
fore the Lowell Institute in Boston, in the winter of 1864-65, 
and gives the reader an account of his experiences as an under- 
graduate at the English University of Cambridge. It is a pleas- 
ant, though a slight performance. Mr. Everett disavows any 
intention of presenting a thorough treatise on English univer- 
sity education, and has published his lectures much as they were 
delivered to a popular audience. We are grateful for any ac- 
count of a personal experience where American personal expe- 
rience is so rare ; but we cannot help regretting that the author 
did not employ his leisure in recasting his discourses. We 
could have exchanged his poetry and the two lectures on the 
great men who have studied at Cambridge, which, though well 
enough as lyceum lectures, contain little that is new or strik- 
ing, for a more exact and minute account of the course of 
study there. In this particular his book is inferior to the only 
other American book of the kind, the very instructive and 
entertaining " Five Years at an English University " of Mr. 
Charles Astor Bristed. We could have wished more particu- 
larly for some account of the real working of those measures of 
reform which have been instituted as the result of the labors 
of the Parliamentary Commission appointed to investigate the 
state of the University in 1857, and for something more than 
what he gives us on the subject of that very important and in- 



616 English University Education. [Oct. 

tercsting movement, the Oxford and Cambridge " Middle-Class 
Examinations." On these and kindred academical subjects 
authentic information is difficult to obtain, and American 
readers are obliged to relj alpiost entirely upon such articles 
as are contained in English periodicals. 

We cannot felicitate Mr. Everett upon the style of his per- 
formance, and must be permitted to express our wonder that 
a young gentleman who has had the benefit of the instruction 
of both English and American Cambridge, should indulge in 
such flowers of rhetoric as those which adorn his pages. Are we 
to understand that they were gathered on the banks of the Cam ? 
But it is with precisely such as these that our Englisli breth- 
ren are wont to reproach our green and immature scholarship. 
Yet we feel quite sure that they were never grown under the 
fostering hand of the accomplished successor of him who, at 
Harvard, in our young days, so ruthlessly demolished all such 
ornaments of our juvenile efforts. What, for instance, are we 
to think of " our matchless Bond, seizing the fiery tresses of the 
trailing wanderers, and unbridling the oceanic ring of Saturn 
from the curb the ages had thrown over it " ? — proceedings 
which that worthy and lamented astronomer would have looked 
on, we think, with some astonishment. Cambridge in the 
character of an Amazon, on page 126, somewhat alarms us, and 
we think that our young orator underrated the taste of his 
Boston audience when he indulged in that peroration to his 
last lecture about the " Chattanooga of liberty " and " Aurora 
opening the gates of the morning." This is what we are ac- 
customed to recognize now-a-days as the " spread-eagle style," 
and to look for from the westward rather than the eastward of 
our meridian. " When you think any passage in your writing 
particularly fine, strike it out^'' was the sensible advice of some 
teacher of rhetoric to a youthful pupil, and Mr. Everett is not 
yet too old to profit by it. 

We must protest, on the other hand, against the slipshod 
use, in a volume on an academic subject, of the abbreviations 
canH.^ would n't, must n't, did n't, which are so frequent in Mr. 
Everett's pages, and to sundry colloquialisms here and there, 
which contrast awkwardly with his too ambitious rhetoric. 

With these drawbacks, however, which the critic is bound to 



1865.] English University Education. 517 

notice, the book is a pleasant and instructive one, — pleasantest 
where the author draws most directly from his personal experi- 
ence, as iu the account of the details of his college life, and the 
picturesque descriptions of the beautiful college buildings of 
Cambridge. With some of these details we had become familiar 
in the pages of college novels ; others were new and somewhat 
surprising. We were struck with Mr. Everett's unpleasant ac- 
count of a college-hall dinner. In our own recollections of 
the " commons" (long numbered with the things of the past) 
in old " University," with its brick-floored halls, and primitive 
benches, we remember no such rudeness at Harvard. We 
should think it would tell very unfavorably on the table man- 
ners of Cambridge graduates. Mr.. Everett's remarks on col- 
lege topics are often sensible and judicious ; and we particu- 
larly commend the parallel he draws between the gentlemanly 
reception of college freshmen by the older students at our 
English sister, and our own brutal, uhgentlemanly, and alto- 
gether abominable college "hazing." No son of Harvard or 
Yale can read this without a sense of shame at the contrast, 
and a feeling that he must do what in him lies to strengthen 
the hands of the college authorities in suppressing this dis- 
graceful relic of barbarism. 

Mr. Everett, as was to be expected from his training, is a 
warm, though not very discriminating, partisan of classical 
study. He gives us the usual commonplaces on the subject, 
but makes no attempt to estimate the real value of the classics 
in comparison with other subjects of liberal study, or the place 
the two great English Universities now hold in the English ma- 
chinery of education. .With the help of the other authorities 
mentioned at the head of our article, we desire to say a few 
words on these subjects. 

Of the complicated university system of Oxford and Cam- 
bridge something may be learned from Mr. Everett's first lec- 
ture, and more from the work of Professor Thorold Rogers. 
That system, like most English institutions, has remained out- 
wardly unchanged almost from the time of its foundation, 
though great internal changes have taken place in its working. 
Originally the university was the educating body, the teaching 
organ, prescribing a regular curriculum of study, and enfor- 



518 English University Education. [Oct. 

cing its observance with pains and penalties, much in the fash- 
ion of our own colleges. But in course of time, and chiefly in 
consequence of changes of which Laud was the originator, the 
colleges have usurped the place of the university proper, and 
from an educating, the latter has become merely a prize-giving 
and degree-conferring body.* This change has led to a total 
change in the style and manner of instruction, by introduing 
the fashion of competitive examinations, and the whole system 
of" honors" ; a system which, though supposed by many to be 
coeval with the founding of the universities, is really of com- 
paratively very recent origin. The first mathematical honor 
list was published in 1746 or 1747, and the so-called " classical 
tripos " was not established till 1824. Not only did this system 
transfer the real teaching from the university professors to the 
college tutors, but a still further change has been worked by it ; 
for, such has been the eagerness of competition for college 
honors, and the more substantial prize of a fellowship, that the 
instruction of private tutors (otherwise " coaches ") has to a 
great degree taken the place of that of the regular college tu- 
tors. So that the college study of Oxford and Cambridge has 
degenerated into little more than a headlong race, a high-pres- 
sure system of cramming, for the purpose of gaining some 
extrinsic object in the shape of a prize or a " living." This 
would describe the life of the studying (we cannot quite say 
studious) minority; the majority of the young men at both 
universities are of that class described by Blackstone, who 
consider the university a place " to while away the awkward 



* " The Professors of Chemistry and Anatomy," says Sir Charles Lyell,in an in- 
teresting chapter on University Education in his first Travels in America, " who had 
formerly considerable classes, have only mustered six or seven pupils, although still 
compelled to give courses of fifty lectures each. The chairs of Modern History and 
of the Application of Machinery to the Arts, once numbering audiences of several 
hundred, have been in like manner deserted." ("Vol. I. p. 240.) See the accumula- 
tion of evidence in the Report of the Oxford Commission, Evidence, p. 268 et seq. 
" A vast majority of the University," says Mr. Senior, " do not attend the lectures 
on Experimental Philosophy. Many leave the University without knowing thai such 
lectures are f/iven." On the general subject the reader may consult with profit the 
learned little work of Professor Maiden, " On the Origin of Universities " ; the 
well-known Essay by Sir William Hamilton, " On the State of the English Univer- 
sities " ; and the excellent paper in the National Review whose title we have placed 
at the head of our article. 



1865.] English University Education, 519 

interval from childhood to twenty-one, in a calm middle state 
of mental and moral inactivity." 

"We do not know how to explain it, save by the thoroughly 
materialistic turn of thought of our English brethren, their 
habit of estimating all things by the amount of solid pudding 
they will bring, that they show such a fondness for this system 
of competition. Everything in England now-a-days is decided 
by a " competitive examination." Not a tide-waiter can get a 
place in the customs, not a young clerk can enter a public 
ofBce, not a cadet can be sent to India, without first submit- 
ting himself to a cramming process, and running a neck-and- 
neck race with five hundred others, through what is meant to 
be a literary examination. The preposterous absurdity of some 
of these is almost incredible,* and the disastrous effects of the 
system on real learning need hardly be pointed out. Cram 
takes the place of real study ; an extraneous object becomes 
the motive of exertion, in place of a genuine love of learning ; 
and a body of so-called teachers springs up, whose object is, not 
to show their pupils how really to learn, but how most cleverly 
to pass an examination. The memory is overtaxed by feverish 
efforts,! while all the higher faculties of the mind are held in 

* The following are some of the questions set for candidates for a £90 clerkship 
in the public offices: — 1. State concisely Ricardo's theory of rent. 2. What do 
you consider to be the chief merits and defects, as philosophers, of Aristotle and 
Plato respectively ? 3, Describe the daily life of a citizen of Athens in the time of 
Pericles, and of Rome in the time of Augustus. 4. "What were the distinctive 
opinions of the old, middle, and new academies ? "We do not wonder at finding a 
blufif old Surveyor-General reporting, " Persons who have stood high in the esti- 
mation of the Civil Service Commissioners have been found of little value here. 
.... They are fond of argumentative displays, and have exhibited towards their 
principals and the public a degree of presumption and self-sufficiency which could 
not be tolerated." Our English brethren boast themselves to be peculiarly a prac- 
tical nation, but really the evidences of their practicality are sometimes not a little 
amusing. 

- t The transient and worthless character of the knowledge acquired under this 
high-pressure system (to say nothing of its destructive influence upon the bodily 
health of the student) has often been pointed out by physiologists and metaphysi- 
cians. " The system of cramming," says Mr. Bain in his recent work, " The Senses 
and the Intellect," " is a scheme for making temporary acquisitions, regardless of 
the endurance of them. Excitable brains, that can command a very great concen- 
tration of force upon a subject, will be proportionably impressed for the time being. 
By drawing upon the strength of the future we are able to fix temporarily a great 
variety of impressions during the exaltation of cerebral power that the excitement 



620 English University Education. [Oct. 

abeyance. Thus real learning is degraded, and true scholar- 
ship is driven from what should be the very home of the Muses. 
To be forever under the pressure of examinations is not the 
normal state of the true student, and we cannot but regret to 
see a tendency in some of our own colleges to substitute the 
English system for the more laborious but far more thorough 
one of class teaching.* 

That this system has worked an unfortunate change in the 
style and standard of English scholarship, there is abundant 
evidence to prove. " However much it may be regretted," 
says the able writer in the National Review, " there can be 
no sort of doubt that the prospect of obtaining a fellowship is 
the power by which the whole education of the university is 
worked." It need hardly be pointed out in how many ways 
the operation of such a system is injurious. In the first place, 
it acts very partially. While it stimulates to undue effort a 
small minority of the best minds, it leaves the great mass of 

gives. The occasion past, the braiu must lie idle for a corresponding length of 
time, while a large portion of the excited impressions will gradually perish away. 
This system is extremely unfavorable to permanent acquisitions ; for these the force 
of the brain should be carefully husbanded and temperately drawn upon. Every 
period of undue excitement and feverish susceptibility is a time of great waste for 
the plastic energy of the mind as a whole." (p. 450.) Whatever may be thought of 
the writer's materialistic philosophy, there can be no doubt of the truth of his prac- 
tical conclusions. See also Llie remarks on Memory in Sir Henry Holland's inter- 
esting " Chapters in Mental Physiology." 

* The evidence of Dr. Whewell on this point, the head of the only College in 
Cambridge where the system is not tolerated, is very emphatic. " I may add," he 
says, " my very decided opinion, that no system of education which is governed 
entirely, or even mainly, by examinations occupying short times with long interven- 
ing intervals, can ever be otherwise than a bad mental discipline. Intellectual edu- 
cation requires that the mind should be habitually employed in the acquisition of 
knowledge, with a certain considerable degree of clear insight and independent 
activity. This is universally promoted by the daily teaching of the lecture-room, 
with the sympathy and interest that the mutual action of various minds produces ; 

it is not necessarily or greatly promoted by the prospect of an examination 

The influence of an English university education would be utterly degraded if ex- 
aminations and their consequences were to supersede the influence of the college 
lecture-rooms; or if college lecture-rooms were to make their claim to respect and 
regard depend solely upon their being the successful rivals of private tutors in pre- 
paring students for university examinations." Report of the Cambridge Univer- 
sity Commission, Evidence, p. 417. See also a striking passage in Father New- 
man's "Office and Work of a University" (p. 112 et seq.), on the deadness and 
want of all sympathy between teaclier and pupil at Oxford in his time. 



1865.] English University Education. 521 

students entirely unaffected. Hopeless of success, they decline 
the competition altogether, and drift througli their college life 
in a state of contented ignorance, carrying from their academic 
halls minds as uncultivated as they brought to them, if they 
have not meantime been swept away to destruction by the 
strong current of vice and dissipation. Yet, strange to say, 
it is from the ignorant, and even from the vicipus ttoWo/, 
that the ranks of the clergy of the Church of England are 
chiefly recruited, by means of the system of presentation to 
livings. We can no longer wonder at the rejection of Mr. 
Gladstone as member for Oxford, when we learn that it was 
chiefly effected by the votes of the country clergy, who are the 
product of this sort of education.* 

The system works unfortunately in another way, inasmuch 
as it establishes as the leading studies, not those which would 
be really most useful and improving, but those which will tell 
best upon a competitive examination. There is a very general 
impression that the predominance of classical studies at Eng- 
lish and American universities has been brought about in 
consequence of profound investigations into tlie nature of the 
human mind and the best methods of training it. Nothing 
can be more erroneous. Such profound investigations, we are 
sorry to say, have never been entered into, and educational 
psychology is a science yet to be created. This predominance 
of classical study is, we had almost said, an accident; rather 
let us say, it is the result of well-known events in history, 
which for a time gave the rediscovered classical writers an 
altogether exceptional value to the mind of Europe. Their 
predominant sway has been continued, not through their in- 
trinsic value being greater than that of any other educational 
instrumentalities, but simply through the force of old prescrip- 
tion, nowhere so strong as in England, and by the influence of 
the English system upon the founders of our older colleges. 
To this may be added the reason with which we are more im- 
mediately concerned, that such studies, pursued as they are in 
England, are suited above all others, not to produce real ex- 

* The account which Mr. Everett gives (p. 340) of the character and behavior of 
a large class of English candidates for holy orders is very surprising. We are glad 
to believe that it has no parallel on this side of the water. 
VOL. CI. —NO. 209. 34 



522 English University Education. [Oct. 

pansion and enlargement of the intellect, but to serve the 
purposes of a cram examination. Accordingly, we find every- 
thing giving place, at Oxford and Cambridge, not even to an 
enlarged and liberal, but to a narrow and technical study of a 
few classical writers, and to the unfruitful study of the most 
useless parts of abstract mathematics. So strong is this influ- 
ence, and s(5 little considered are any studies save those that 
bring " marks," and, with marks enough, a fellowship, that the 
attempt made, in accordance with the recommendations of the 
University Commission of 1857, to establish natural and moral 
science *' triposes " seems, thus far, to have proved a total 
failure. The profoundest knowledge of principles avails noth- 
ing in an examination when tricks and intellectual tours de 
force count for $o much. Physical science, law, and the phi- 
losophy of history necessitate real knowledge, and cannot be 
broken up into convenient parcels to suit the precise wants 
of an examiner. And accordingly we find Professor Rogers 
reporting the average number of first-class men in these " op- 
tional schools " at only five or six per annum. 

When we speak thus of the failure of university reform, we 
speak subject to correction. Information respecting it is diffi- 
cult to obtain ; and we know how often it is the case that great 
changes may be taking place in institutions whose outward 
framework may give no sign of the internal revolution pro- 
ceeding within them. We cannot but wish that some one of 
our academic friends across the water — and we are happy 
to believe that under that term we can include nearly all the 
best of England's true scholars — would give us more light 
on the subject. As at present advised, we cannot help believ- 
ing that classical studies, and those of a very barren kind, and 
mathematical studies of not much greater value, still retain 
their mischievous monopoly at both universities. 

We say mischievous monopoly. We wish to be counted 
among the friends of true classical learning ; but no true 
friend will wish to see it retain the usurped place it now holds 
in modern higher education. The argument with which an 
attempt is made to build up a theory by which Greek and 
Latin shall forever remain the basis of education, upon their 
accidental and exceptional importance at the time of the re- 



1865.] English University Education. ' 523 

vival of learning, seems to be sufficiently refuted by the 
manifest failure of the system to meet the wants of a totally 
different period ; yet it is surprising how tenaciously its adhe- 
rents refuse to recognize the demands of the new times. Mr. 
Everett, as a young student fresh from his Homer and Thucy- 
dides, may be pardoned his fulsome eulogy of classical study, 
(surely his classics never tauglit him such rhetoric,) and his 
slur at men whose arguments and opinions he shows clearly he 
has never studied. But it is surprising to find in such scholars 
as Mr. Froude, the historian,* and Mr. Clark, the accomplished 
editor of Shakespeare,! such a want of apprehension of the 
absolute necessity in these modern times of widening the cur- 
riculum of university study and giving their just rights to 
modern science. Sneers at the " utilitarianism " of Gower 
Street come with an ill grace from a scholar, when the London 
University has become such a power in the English academic 
world. It is unfortunate that it is so difficult for either party 
in the controversy to do justice to the merits of the other ; 
that the friends of reform will insist upon attempting to prove 
classical study worthless, while the adherents of the classics 
can see nothing in the study of science but an attempt at a 
" diluted omniscience." The problem must be approached in 
a far different spirit before it will receive its true solution. 

Happily there are some who ■ do approach it in a different 
spirit. Dr. Whewell, in a learned and interesting lecture J 
on education, has pointed out clearly " how," to use his own 
words, " every great advance in intellectual education has 
been the effect of some considerable scientific discovery or 
group of discoveries. Every improvement of the mental dis- 
cipline of those who stand in the forefront of humanity has 
followed some signal victory of their leaders ; every addition 
to the means of intellectual culture has been the result of 
some extraordinary harvest, some more than ordinary bounty 
of the intellectual soil bestowed on the preceding years." We 
should give a very wide meaning to the word "scientific" 

* Oxford Essays for 1855. 
t Cambridge Essays for 1855. 

J " On the Influence of the History of Science upon Intellectual Education," 
delivered at the Royal Institution in 1854. 



524 English University Education. [Oct. 

in tliis passage ; but unquestionably Dr. Whewcll has here 
laid down an important principle in educational philosophy, 
this, namely, that every important intellectual revolution must 
of necessity be accompanied by a corresponding revolution in 
inethods of education. Such a revolution the revival of 
learning caused by dethroning scholasticism in favor of clas- 
sical learning. Such a revolution modern physical science is 
now making, by depriving classical study of its monopoly, and 
relegating it to its true place, as merely an important branch 
of the study of philosophy and literature. How it can any 
longer be maintained that there is some mysterious power in 
the study of Greek and Latin grammar, not possessed by any 
similar, or any other studies ; how intelligent men can argue 
as though these were the only studies in which thoroughness 
is possible, while every other pursuit must be marked by super- 
ficiality and sciolism ; how any one can maintain that the mere 
study of classics and matliematics forms a complete mental or- 
ganon, when the narrowing influence of their exclusive study is 
patent in the character of so many of their votaries,* — passes 
our comprehension. It is utterly impossible for the bigoted 
adherents of classical study to withstand the current of opin- 
ion ; but it is unfortunate tliat so many Englisli scholars, whose 
influence has heretofore been so great in this country, shoiild 
be so narrow in their views of what constitutes a liberal edu- 
cation. That influence, however, is not likely to be so great 
as it has been. 

It is surprising that the modern advocates of classical studies 
do not see that what they call classical learning is something 
entirely different from the classical learning of the period of 
the revival of letters, and that the latter really approaches 
much nearer to the system of the advocates of an enlargement 
of the course of liberal study than to their own. Tliis point 
has been so admirably brought out by Professor Gold win Smith, 



* Ou the effect of the omission of the study of inductive science from modern 
education in leaving so-called educated men a prey to superstition and delusion, 
see the striking evidence of Dr. Carpenter and Professor Faraday, reprinted from 
the Report of the Public School Commission, in the Appendix to the recently-pub- 
lished pamphlet of Mr. W. P. Atkinson, entitled " Classical and Scientific Studies, 
and the Great Schools of England." 



1865.] English University Education. 525 

in his Lectures on History, that we cannot refrain from quot- 
ing the passage. 

■^ " The nobility and gentry as a class," says Professor Smith, " seem 
to have been certainly more highly educated in the period of the late 
Tudors and the earlier Stuarts than in any other period of our history. 
Their education was classical ; but classical learning meant then, not a 
gymnastic exercise of the mind in philology, but a deep draught from 
what was the great and almost the only spring of philosophy, science, 
history, and poetry at that time. It is not to philological exercises that 
our earliest Latin grammar exhorts the student, nor is it a mere sharp- 
ening of the faculties that it promises as his reward. It calls to the 
study of the language wherein is contained a great treasure of wisdom 
and knowledge ; and, the student's labor done, wisdom and knowledge 
were to be his meed. It was to open that treasure, not for the sake of 
philological niceties or beauties, not to shine as the inventor of a canon, 
or the emendator of a corrupt passage, that the early scholars under- 
took the ardent, lifelong, and truly romantic toils which their massy 
volumes bespeak to our days, — our days which are not degenerate 
from theirs in labor, but in which the most ardent intellectual labor is 
directed to a new prize. Besides, Latin was still the language of lit- 
erary, ecclesiastic, diplomatic, legal, academic Europe ; familiarity with 
it was the first and most indispensable accomplishment, not only of the 
gentlemen, but of the high-born and royal ladies of the time.* We 
must take all this into account when we set the claims of classical 
against those of modern culture, and balance the relative amount of 
motive power we have to rely on for securing industry iA either case. 
In choosing the subjects of a boy's studies, you may use your own dis- 
cretion ; in choosing the subjects of a man's studies, if you desire any 
worthy and fruitful effort, you must choose such as the world values, 
and such as may win the allegiance of a manly mind. It has been said, 
that six months' study of the language of Schiller and Goethe will now 
open to the student more high enjoyment than six years' study of the 
languages of Greece and Rome. It is certain that six months' study 
of Frencli will now open to the student more of Europe than six years' 
study of that which was once the European tongue. These are changes 
in the circumstances and conditions of education which cannot be left 
out of sight in dealing with the generality of minds. Great discoveries 
have been made by accident ; but it is an accidental discovery, and must 

* [It might be added, that so much was Latin considered the vernacular language 
of scholars and educated persons, that it is not till of late years that a professorship 
of Latin has existed at Oxford. See the Inaugural Lecture of Professor Coning- 
tou, the present incumbent.] 



526 English University Education. [Oct. 

be noted as such, if the studies which were first pursued as the sole key 
to wisdom and knowledge, now that they have ceased not only to be 
the sole, but the best key to wisdom and knowledge, are still the best 
instrum,ents of education." * 

Even if classical studies were the best of all educations for 
the English aristocracy and clergy, it is clear that, at best, 
they are but a class education, and thus peculiarly unfitted to 
form the basis of a republican system. And as England ad- 
vances nearer and nearer to the establishment of republican 
institutions, the perception of this fact is gradually dethroning 
Oxford and Cambridge from their old supremacy even in Eng- 
lish education. The evidence is clear that they no longer hold 
the place they once did in popular estimation in England. 

" "With a population greatly increased," says Professor Thorold Rog- 
ers, who is a graduate of, and was for many years a tutor at Oxford,! 
" and with national wealth almost if not actually doubled, with general 
and special education still more extensively enlarged within the last 
twenty years, the number of undergraduates in the universities has 
absolutely declined within that period, and the sympathies of the nation 
with its ancient academies have grown weaker and weaker. Men care 
less and less for academic distinction, know less and less of academic 
learning, feel less and less the immediate influence of an academic train- 
ing ; and the connection between the universities and the Church bids 
fair to be the sole remaining link between the country and its noblest 

corporations Without the exaction of a degree by the bishops 

from those who present themselves for holy orders, there would not 
remain one fifth of the present number of students." % 

We cannot wonder at this when we read of the deadness, 
the narrowness, and enormous abuses at these universities. 
"The school of Law and Modern History," says Professor 
Rogers, " is a sham, and withal a superficial sham. Scholar- 
ship, philosophy, and history are borrowed from French and 
German authors. Very little has been added to the general 
stock of human learning out of the vast endowments of uni- 

* Lectures on History, I. 21. 

t Mr. Rogers in 1862 was elected Professor of Political Economy at Oxford. 

X See, on the decline of the universities, the remarkable speeches of Mr. Ilors- 
man in the House of Commons, and of the later Ex-Chancellor Lyndhurst in the 
House of Lords, in the debate on University Reform. Hansard's Debates, Vols, 
for 1854 and 1855. 



1865.] English University Education. 527 

versity and college income, — endowments equalling the in- 
comes of many states." The aids and rewards of study at 
Oxford are estimated at half a million sterling per annum. 
Some idea of their distribution is given when we read that the 
Craven Scholarship, the most valuable at the University, by 
being limited to founder's kin, has often been held by passmen ; 
that the Vinerian Scholarships, founded expressly for the pro- 
motion of the stndy of law, " are bestowed without any refer- 
ence to knowledge of law, or any pledge to study it " ; that at 
Cambridge King's College, with a revenue of X 25,000 a year, 
admits annually from fioe to twelve undergraduates ; that the 
noble foundation of All Souls, at Oxford, is a mere burrow for 
a few indolent, monkish celibates. 

But we cannot believe that these magnificent institutions, 
with all their time-hallowed memoxies, dear to us as well as 
to Englishmen, dear to all who speak the English tongue the 
world over, are destined to decay and perish. The English- 
man is no revolutionist, but there is a wonderful power of 
recuperation, as well as tenacity of life, in English institutions. 
We cannot believe that University Reform is to be a failure. 
We rather look to see this odious monopoly of the colleges 
destroyed, which seems to have crushed the life out of profes- 
sorial teaching ; to see this disgraceful scramble for mere col- 
lege prizes and emoluments replaced by a real pursuit of learn- 
ing. When we remember that in Professors' chairs at Oxtbrd 
are now such men as Goldwin Smith, and Jowett, and Miil- 
ler, and Conington, and Arnold, — at Cambridge, such men as 
Kingsley and Thompson, — we cannot believe that their teach- 
ing can remain barren and unheeded. Surely it cannot but be 
one of the first wishes in the heart of every American scholar 
to see these venerable seats of learning in his mother country 
flourishing in renewed youth, and restored to more than their 
former glory.* 

* The true education of Oxford and Cambridge consists at present not so much 
in the studies pursued as in the life led there, by the better class of students. There 
is abundant evidence to show that the eager struggle for places and honors, however 
e*ril its effects may be otherwise, does not lead to petty jealousies and rivalries ; but 
that the intercourse of the students with one another is free, generous, and manly. 
We wish that space allowed us to quote the truly beautiful and eloquent passage in 
praise of his Alma Mater, with which, after all his sharp criticism, the writer in the 
National Review concludes his article. 



528 Education of the Freedmen. [Oct. 

Art. VII. — 1. General Orders of the Freedmen' s Bureau, 
Nos. 1-11. Washington. 1865. 

2. Firsts Second, and Third Annual Reports of the Neio Eng- 
land Freedtnen's Aid Society (^Educational Commission). 
Boston. 1863,1864,1865. 

3. Freedmen's Record. A Monthly Journal, published by the 
same Society. 1865. 

4. First, Second, and Third Annual Reports of the National 
Freedmen^s Relief Association. New York. 1863, 1864, 
1865. 

5. The National Freedman. A Monthly Journal of the same 
Society. 1865. 

6. Annual Report of the Western Freedmen' s Association. 
Cincinnati. August, 1865. 

7. Pennsylvania Freedmen's Bulletin. A Monthly Journal, 
published by the Pennsylvania Freedmen's Association. 
1865. 

8. Chicago FreedmerCs Bulletin. A Monthly Journal, pub- 
lished by the Northwestern Freedmen's Aid Commission. 

9. Reports of the Superintendents of Freedmen for Eastern 
Virginia, North Carolina, Tennnessee, and Arkansas, and 
of the Board of Education for Freedmen, Department of 
the Gulf 1864, 1865. 

John Adams's axiom, that civil society must be built up on 
the four corner-stones of the church, the school-house, the mi- 
litia, and the town-meeting, receives new illustration, of the 
most distinct kind, as we work out the great problem of to-day. 
Whichever panacea is presented to us in the great work of the 
admission of the four million negroes into our civil society, and 
the establishment of their social rights, fails tb pass test till we 
have so extended the proposed arrangements that, in its work 
of blessing, all four of the essential rights of religion, education, 
self-defence, and self-government are provided for. Thus, it is 
of little use to give the negro a vote, unless he can read it; nor, 
if he can read it, unless he can defend himself from being sho't 
down like a dog as he offers it ; while, again, voting and defence 
both suppose a conscience fitly trained for their right exercise. 



Xxi 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS A 

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